 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome to 2019, welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another episode of Security Matters Hawaii. And we're the security guy here and today we've got Dr. Robert Fish with us. He is from Princeton University, he's out here representing the IEEE and a bunch of other organizations as near as I can tell. So we're going to have some fun today getting into I think the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, something we don't talk about a lot. You guys have all heard me rant and raving about how our industry evolved ignoring standards with which these guys have built for a reason. So hopefully we'll get into some of that discussion. Thanks for letting me interrupt your holiday celebrations and coming into the studio, good to see you. Well thanks for having me on the show. I'm really happy to talk to some of the people here about some of these technology things going on. Awesome, awesome. So I'll tell you what, go ahead and give our audience some of your background as much as you care to share and they'll get to know you a little bit better. Oh sure. Well, let's see, I've been in the telecommunications industry for most of my career. I started Bell Laboratories several decades ago, we won't be too specific. Right, so first at Bell Labs and then I worked for Panasonic actually for a while in their communications business and finally I did a startup on mobile device management. Oh wow, MDM, yes. Yes, yes and after that I'm doing some consulting and I've been in Princeton for about four years now trying to… Wow. Tell me about MDM, were you ahead of, before everyone knew they'd want that? Well, I mean it became quite a cluster for many organizations. Yeah, yeah, I think device management really came into its own when we started having such diversity of devices going on the network and a lot of competitive networks coming up and each device had to be configured separately and some countries, people were on more than one network and they were swapping sims constantly and you had to reconfigure the device for every network it went on and as the mobile industry grew into the billions it became a big deal. So is that something you continue with or do you roll that one off and go get in some other stuff? No, that business was sold actually, it was sold to Alcatel Lucent, now Nokia and they're doing their thing so I think I'm on to other things. Wow, so from, was there an entrepreneurial spirit early at Bell Labs? I've heard that, I know 3M's got that sort of reputation, I didn't know how it was that, did you guys build like RS485, what were you developing back there, I mean DTMF? Well, of course DTMF was created at Bell Labs in about 1960 I think. So this was after you got, before you got there, sorry. Yeah, before I got there, my work at the labs is primarily on visual communications. Oh, okay, wow. So you know today when you look at, you take out your cell phone and you can see somebody and chat with them and know that they're available to chat with. Ah, gotcha. That was kind of the work that we did there and yeah, so we did some of the very first I would say IP based and in a protocol based video communications systems. Wow, okay. And you know a lot of the features that you might see on a Skype or on a Google Hangouts today are things that we pioneered way back when. Wow, that's what we're using now, all of you out there saying you're benefiting from all of his work. Yeah, well you know for a long time people thought that people didn't want to see each other when they communicated and it just turned out that the technology was a little premature, but actually people do it. Yeah, they can't even hear you if they can't see you, right? Because there's so much communication as your face and your expression and all those cues they get about what you're saying. Yeah, yeah and I think it's that kind of informal communication that really turned out to be the niche, not the more formal business oriented things. But you know, taking out your cell phone at some airline lounge and calling your kids back home, that turned out to be the killer app for that. Sure, and it just enabled a bunch of wonderful holidays for many people I'm sure who couldn't be together. So they Skyped in and you know, talked with their grandmas, my granddaughter. I was like, I was like an hour late, she was gone. So my bad there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've, so get us into your engagement with IEEE. Is it the long time relationship there? Oh yeah, so I've been a member of IEEE for, again, decades. Okay. Yeah. So IEEE is, for those of you in your audience who don't know, IEEE started out as the Institute for Electrical Electronic Engineering. It goes back actually to 1884. Wow. Thomas Edison actually was one of the startups, startup people oriented towards it. Today it's a global organization. We have about 420,000 members all around the world, about half of them in North America and for these purposes Hawaii is part of North America. Yeah, you see pictures of us down in the Caribbean. And about half in the rest of the world, India, China, Middle East, Africa, Europe, so all over. And IEEE is basically a way for people who are engineers or engineers and scientists in the electrical or electronic areas to have a kind of professional home that's the global in nature and allows them to meet their peers all around the world, those peers both sort of geographically as well as in their own individual discipline. And IEEE has, it's divided into societies. So our biggest society is our computer society, as you might guess. And then communication society, signal processing, power and energy. We have 46 societies and power systems, yeah. That's interesting, we have 16 NIP sectors for the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, but 46 societies, so 40. Yeah, so everywhere from ocean engineering to ferromagnetics to a variety of other areas, microwave techniques and technology, which actually had their big conference here in Hawaii about a year and a half ago. So my association in IEEE has been primarily in communication society and with the standards association. And, but I belong to a few others as well. So we have, we obviously have ISOs, and I'm on an STS, Steiner's technical panel with UL currently trying to work on our industry's toys. Talk a little bit about the role IEEE played or where they fit in that realm of standards development or standards publication or how that's used. Yeah, so IEEE as a standards organization is a little different than some of the big, some of the other international standards organizations. We are international, but we're primarily kind of market driven. We're bottom up driven by people who have technical contributions and have some idea for some technology that they think the market will expand for if it becomes standardized. So in IEEE really individual members get to vote or your company can join and your company can vote on and ballot on a standard, things like that. If you compare this to something like ITU, International Telecommunications Union, there it's a country based system. So one country, one vote, and it's a sort of more formal, I would say, organization based out of the United Nations in Geneva. And so IEEE tries to involve individuals in technology development and then in technology standardization. And I think that's really our unique niche, if you will. And do you, do standardizations kind of play well? I mean, obviously internationally we all need to understand what we're talking about, you know, and we didn't get on the metric system, you know? So we, they still, I don't know if anyone knows what a mile is yet. But, you know, outside the US anyway. But is that, I guess, how do they relate? Are there charts of comparative standards and things like that? Or do they focus in different areas? Yeah, it's a marketplace out there, right? Sure. Some things you absolutely need to have international standards in which countries agree, a typical one would be spectrum allocations. Okay. Radio waves don't know where the boundary between US and Mexico or Canada are. They just go. So you need to have some international agreements with regard to spectrum. But in many other areas, there are hierarchy of standards. There are local market driven ones. There are ones that are national in nature. And then ones that are regional or international. And the organizations talk to each other. They do talk to each other. IEEE, for instance, is a sector member for ITU. And, you know, we have joint conferences and things like that together. So there is a large degree of cooperation between the organizations. And frankly, a lot of people work in both of those kinds of environments. I see. Which makes sense. I mean, what's super important is that if you haven't ever come across these sort of problems, when you've got a technology, our mass security industry is a great example of this that's developed and ignored pieces of normal standards or left them out. You really end up with things like some of the cyber problems that we've had in our industry today as a great example where there were standards for internet protocol and standards for TCP and the things you should do that we just didn't do. And so when you ignore standards or try to develop applied technologies outside of standards, I think it really can create a problem. Ours has been 30 years in the making and it might be 30 years in the unmaking. I don't know, but it's really grim. Yeah, well, I think the thing about standards are really that it's a terrific way to open markets. Okay. Because if multiple manufacturers or service providers or others who are involved in an industry are building towards a standard, then whatever it is that they're promoting or selling or distributing has a wider market. It can have a market not only in their local area, but perhaps in other areas around the world. Growth in markets means growth in revenues, typically. And when there's growth in revenues, everybody wins. So that's really the important part about adopting standards. And in IEEE, really our view is that there's no monopoly on good ideas. It's not a situation where only the guys sitting in Washington or Beijing or something have the best ideas. The best ideas come from the bottom from lots of practicing engineers or people who are in the business and are installing, for instance, security things in companies or in factories. And they say, here's a problem. Let's see if there's some technology that could can fix this. And I think the other big area, of course, in standards is lots of safety oriented things, right? I mean, electrical standards, it's considered poor form to install an electrical system that catches on fire regularly or things like that. So- Does it happen outside the US much? Do you know? Do you have any visibility on the global picture for that? I've seen ugly images, obviously. You know, we all have, right? Sure, sure. Darwin Award candidates and things like that. Mercy. Well, let's, speaking of Darwin, let's, I'll tell you what, we'll take about a one minute break, we'll pay some bills, and we'll be right back with Dr. Fish. Thank you. With the help of a physical therapist, physical therapists treat pain through movement and exercise. No warning labels required. And you get to actively participate in your care. Choose to improve your health without the risks of opioids. Choose physical therapy. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Aloha, welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios. Andrew, the security guy here, and with Dr. Robert Fish from the IEEE. And we're talking a little bit about standards and IEEE standards and how standards work in industry. But we also want to figure out what brings the guides teaching up in Princeton out to Hawaii, other than the beautiful sunshine in December. Well, it's the new year. So we should all start the new year in a pleasant way. In Hawaii. That would be great. But we have a couple of events coming up here in Hawaii. So on the 19th of January, just before the PTC show here. And that's the Pacific Telecommunication Conference? Yes, Pacific Telecommunications Council Conference. Yes. Yes. So here's a piece of it. It's a one-day pre-event. Yes, that's right. One-day pre-event. At the same location at the Hilton Hawaiian Village here in Honolulu. And what we're trying to do is bring to Hawaii some of the best speakers on some new telecommunications technologies. Awesome. And what we'd like to be able to do is offer something to those of you out there who are maybe not researchers in telecommunications, but just using it within your general work and would like to find out where things are going. So we have things about optical networking and satellite communications and some things about public safety networks. AI, AI is always a big deal these days. Yeah, everywhere, sure. Yeah, artificial intelligence, some stuff on security as well, machine learning. So a variety of topics where we bring in experts and provide maybe about 40-minute talks on these areas and have a day-long program for that. So we're really looking forward to doing that. This is the second year that we've done it. Last year, we met over at the East-West Center and at the University of Hawaii. And this year, we decided to sort of be in conjunction with PTC and see whether or not some of their audience might be interested in our work as well. Yeah, I saw that if you get a PTC registration, this is included. Or you can just get this for one day. And it might have been an extra charge or something. Yeah, something like that. But it's there. So you can just go down to this for the day as well. So get down to Hilton Hawaii. Now, this type of work here isn't purely academic. Or it is, but it's leading into development or applied. Yeah, so IEEE has, I forget the number now, but it's something like 1,600 conferences a year around the world. Really? Yeah. 1,600. It's like four a day every day. That's right. It's amazing. But one of the things, a lot of those conferences are, as you say, kind of academic or research focused. Maybe you need a PhD to really understand. To get on the shit. Oh, to get a seat in the audience. No, no, not necessarily. You can always sit in the audience. But these talks, while it's building on that work, are not at that sort of cutting edge research level. But really, they're kind of synopsis of some of their latest research work and where the technology is going in these various areas. In your experiences, just a question that sort of came to me. Let's just take in the communications realm. How far ahead are we researching things? Maybe it says DARPA work. But how far out there is the research before, let's just say 10% or 20% of it actually gets applied in the industry and used? Is it a decade? Is it five years? What are you seeing? It goes, it's certainly anywhere from five to 10 to sometimes 20 years, depending upon how fundamental the technology is. One of the talks that we have in communications futures is on optical networking. And of course, optical networking really depends on lasers being put into fiber optic channels. But the laser was invented in the late 50s, early 60s, depending upon who you believe. And fiber optics came along about 10 years later. And today, it's a primarily a world girdling mechanism for transmitting communications. But it's a development that's lasted over 50 or 60 years. So early research for very primary kinds of inventions like the laser take a long time. But some things you might invent this year and see them in a product in three or four years. It really depends on the nature of what the innovation is. What we need, I think, after what we saw last week with CenturyLink, is some self-healing fiber hack technology because of a lot of the countries. So we even had some issues out here. So it was amazing what this very robust infrastructure can have issues in the world. They're always trade-offs. So you can build a network that's self-healing. You can build a network that's redundant, but you have to be willing to spend the money. Yeah, oh, the spend. There's the capital spend. Right, so CAF-X, AFF-X, all of that really goes into how rigorous a job you're doing in building the network and what you expect for the liability out of it. Everything costs money, even in security. Oh, of course. Do these presenters that you bring now, these are from around the world? Around the world, yeah. We're looking at the Asia, US, Europe, every place, really. Because IEEE truly is a global organization. So there are people doing just tremendous work, just every place you can think of. Is it hard to get them to come to Hawaii in December in January? Yeah, it's not hard. It's not hard to persuade them. But there are people who are busy, too. So they need to take some time out and get across the ocean. Talk about their focus of their work. So this is the second year for this event. What's the sort of turnout? Must have been successful last year, so you're back. Yeah, well, we have a room for everyone who wants to come. Nice, nice. Yeah, so we should be so lucky to have only standing room. Yeah, yeah. But that's what you hope for. After today, you might. Don't tell anyone. It's a Saturday, and I know a lot of people in Hawaii like to go to the beach on the weekends. Instead of get their brain filled up, I see. But so we're asking a little bit for you to take a detour and maybe learn something new that you can apply in your own areas. Yeah, and I saw, I thought there was some underwater, like there was that PTC focus or was it in this event? Because there's been a concern that the technology there has grown so quickly, they can just bypass Hawaii. Now, they used to have to come here and come up out of the water and get a little relay, but now they can just go by us. And so it's like, hey, wait, don't forget about Hawaii. Yeah, so Hawaii is very centrally located from the point of view of the Pacific Ocean, but it's right in the center. So sometimes there are some long distances involved there. Yeah, so I think some of the PTC sponsors are some of the local groups here that are working on. I think we're landing one new fiber. Some of our stuff's maybe 20 years old now, so it's starting to age out. So there's a concern about, we have capacity now, but there's always the, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, what if we let that die, what will we do? Well, I mean, fiber optics relies on, in essence, communications technologies when it's not in a light form. And so that's electronics. And electronics has a limited lifetime. And of course, there's always Moore's Law, right, which indicates that the semiconductors that you used three years ago are now improved to about double the capacity. For half the price. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. Yeah, so it's not surprising that you have to renew your electronics, certainly on a regular basis. And assuming a shark or something doesn't actually devour the cable, the fiber can stay there for a little longer, I think. Has the atrip we ventured into any of the protection? I'm a member of InfraGuard. There's a lot of talk about electromagnetic burst and things like that. And a lot of this equipment that we talk about that's long haul relay equipment is above the surface and it's unshielded. Does that actually work on some of that? I suggest you shield it. Of course. And actually, I think the grid's broken up where Texas has its own and they're actually pretty good. Texas has its own electrical grid. Right, right. So that equipment, I guess they've done a good job but out west they haven't. When I learned these things at some of these conferences, I'm like, really? So I didn't know if does that trip we have? Well, we have a society for nuclear and plasma physics. Okay, oh. That's a question that you might be able to ask. I don't know if I want them in here or not. They'd have to host their own episode for that. Wow. Interesting, interesting stuff. So what's your role? I know you're doing communication. This is actually put on by the SOCOM out of. So the communications side. The communications side. And so you work on the standards body but you're also helping to promote. Yeah, so actually I'm president of the Standards Association. So I mean some examples of IEEE standards include things like almost all of our local area networking. So IEEE 802.3 is otherwise known as Ethernet. 802.11 is known as Wi-Fi. We have 802.15 is Bluetooth. So many, many, many of our communications technologies have been standardized in IEEE. And each one of the things I just named have next generation things coming up. So being a member of the communication society and being an active participant in IEEE standards is very, they help each other out a lot. I bet they do. It was interesting, I had never been on a panel, I'm not an engineer, so they invited, they wanted an integrator voice at this UL, this STP we're building for the 2,900 series. I don't know, okay, I'll try. It's very interesting to watch the, it takes a long time to develop sort of consensus around even the approach to building the standard. And so it was, it's a lot of fun. It's a great thing to mention. So for instance, one of the standards that we have is about power over Ethernet. So you can have Ethernet but you also do power. But when you do that, you're bringing two industries that haven't typically talked to each other together, the electrical power industry and the communications industry. And so safety standards have to be there because if you're going to be putting power over communications cables, then you need to make sure that, you know, no ignition occurs. Yeah, exactly. Inappropriate. You don't want crosstalk to get a little hot spot. That's right. We don't want a hot spot in power over Ethernet. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. I saw this guy's making, just to that point, making a super cable instead of 24 gauge, he's twist and 20 gauge and taking power and data quite a bit further, which is not standard. But like sometimes I got to run a camera and I don't want to have to have an injector, you know, at the end of the standardized distance. Of course you got to get a waiver for that in the installation, because the installation says you got to absorb the standards. So it's kind of interesting sometimes to be straight up. That's a great example, right? So a practitioner such as yourself sees the need for some new piece of technology, something that'll go further distance or give a higher power. Just save a little money, you know, that's all. Something like that. And someone like you can, you know, actually become a participant. Anybody can become a participant in IEEE standards. It's just, you just have to show up basically. That's awesome. So get engaged with these standards bodies if you're not familiar with this stuff. Look, Atriplee has a chapter in Hawaii. Oh, absolutely, section right here. A section, okay, and it's on the website. You can go to the atriplee.atriplee.org. Yes, atriplee.org. And find that and then join those guys. Just type up Hawaii section and meet so over here in Makiki, I think. There you go. And so find out what they're up to. Probably meet some other folks. Is it all engineers? Is it practitioners? What do you kind of group? Yes, it's everything, really. You know, people from some small startups, some professors, some students. Students are more than welcome. So yeah, everyone. Awesome, so check that out. Check out a couple of weeks from now on Saturday the 19th, the Summit for Communications Futures. Learn some stuff about what's happened in this space and go definitely spend some time on the atriplee website. I think you'll learn a lot about what these guys are up to and how broad the reach is of this organization. Dr. Fish, I really appreciate your time today. Oh well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming down. I know you're on holiday, but... Is that what he did? There you go, there you go. And I really do appreciate that. And thank you out there for joining us because security matters. Aloha.