 Well good morning everyone. Let me add my welcome to that of Steve. It's great to see you all here on this beautiful and slightly cooler day. So we've been led to believe. So Steve has told you who I am just a little bit about the Woods Institute for those of you who are not familiar. We found it at 10 years ago. This will be our 10th year which we're celebrating and Lee Johnson's in the can raise your hand employee number one and still at Stanford and still smiling which is the way we like it. The Woods Institute was founded to integrate across all the incredible environmental and sustainability assets that we have at Stanford to provide a platform and a go-to place for finding solutions to the major environmental challenges that we face this century and in 10 years we're very proud of what we've achieved and one of the the obvious places where we would participate is this affiliates program and so I don't often get a chance to say this publicly so I'd like to just embarrass Steve Aglesh for about two seconds here and just publicly acknowledge the incredible work that he's done in in driving this environment and affiliates and energy affiliates program I think it's he puts in a remarkable amount of work I think many of you know him many of you have interacted with him and so I just like to publicly acknowledge Steve and Marjorie who have put this conference together so let's acknowledge that thank you. So why this meeting it's it's interesting you know I think a lot of people sort of ask you know what is big data I find myself asking that all the time when I first heard the term I'd never really thought about big data versus data and then a good friend of mine Jesse Fink he gave me a book on big data and just because it is big data you get a big book so if you have big data you have to have a big book but if you haven't seen this book it's a really great one it's called the human face of big data and I don't get any cut for it for encouraging but it actually enabled me just to see exactly what big data was all about in terms of what it could do I still can't define it so I left that to Dan Ariely I don't if you know but Dan Ariely came up with I think the best definition of big data that I can think of and it goes like this big data is like teenage sex everybody talks about it nobody really knows how to do it everyone thinks everyone else is doing it so everyone claims they're doing it that's about the best I've heard but by the end of today I am very confident that we can take Dan Ariely's definition just set it aside because we'll have a much better idea about what big data is and how it's being done and what the potential is and what the applications are and I think will be in a lot better shape and so today we're gonna do a number of things we're gonna have some talks which will be good examples of applications there'll be talks about the potential and and sort of the science that goes behind big data and I think Hector Garcia Molina former chair of computer science will be here a little later and tell you about the the data science initiative at Sanford and I know Margot Gerritsen in her talk will probably address some of sort of the theoretical or the the pedagogical aspects of what big data is and what it can and can produce for us so there will be a data science initiative at Stanford it'll probably be huge and big and have lots of application areas including the medical area and energy and environment etc and just to put a little bit of teeth into it Steve and I put our heads together we found some initial funding and so just so you know we will be we have put out an RFP for proposals to Stanford faculty on sensors and big data as they apply to the environment and energy and so we're expecting some very exciting proposals part and parcel I think it's not just gonna be an academic exercise I think part and parcel of what we do in the seed funding process is exactly that it's a seed funding but what we expect the PIs to do with that is to go out and find partners like yourselves who can then work together in real time on these problems and build a sort of larger ecosystem around this so this is just to get it started and so this is not going to be just for Stanford faculty hopefully it will involve many of you in some way shape or form as as this moves along so we've announced the RFP hopefully we'll get a number of excellent proposals by the end of June and we can see what we can do to move this forward so I think this is a gonna be a great day I'm really excited to learn more about what everybody else is doing and what the potential is here