 When we talk about blockchain, blockchain as a disruptor within the analytics industry and I'm going to go a little bit beyond the hype in my presentation. First off, I'm very pleased to be here in Ireland and I want to thank the sponsors and organizers of this event. I am a professor and assistant dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. I focus on regulatory affairs of food and food industries. I also happen to have the 25 years of experience working within the food policy arena. And I have my entire life to thank for this idea of being connected to food and I would imagine that every single one of us in the audience has seen that food has played an essential part of our rights of passage, whether it be eating lunch at school, learning to cook on our own, eating away from home for the first time, shopping for ourselves, work within the industry or eating at work and even having children. There are critical elements of these phases in our life that always impact or are impacted by food. Equally important to note is that at every single one of these points, this rights of passage is impacted by pathogens, e. coli, salmonella, listeria, etc. Whether it be a foodborne pathogen or a food allergen. We hear far too much news about this on a far too regular basis. But these incidents, these crisis become crises that capture public attention. If we look at this in terms of a policy view, what do these incidents or crises look like? These are the real faces that I've worked with these families for over 25 years in terms of what does it look like when we go beyond the statistics, we go beyond the pie chart, the data, and we look at an actual face, a name, a story, a family that is impacted. In some cases, it may be temporarily. In some cases, catastrophic. The majority of these faces you see here are those who are dealing with a chair forever empty at the family table. When we look, the red line shows you this idea of how during monitoring stages, after an event, when there is public attention, there are many companies. Again, I do want to talk about companies in terms of the fact that there are so many companies that do the right thing every point. They prioritize, they invest, and they really place consumer safety as a very important part of their mission. But not all companies will make changes during this period of time. Some will wait until there are court cases, there is litigation, there is legislation changes in regulation and oversight. This is when you see, unfortunately, a vast majority of companies make those decisions to change their protocols, to recall products, to stop doing what they're doing, that essentially enables a failure within the supply safety system. If you look at this over time, the more time that takes place after an event takes place, after that public attention to the incident, we have a decrease in options, while at the same time we have an increase in liabilities. And in today's world, today's very complex world of our food supply and food distribution, we have multiple states, multiple countries involved in some of these outbreaks that it just complicates the communication, the investigation, the public health efforts. And when it comes to the idea of a recall or stopping the problem, again, it complicates that issue even more. Over the last 25 years, and some of the presentations we've seen here today have already shown the idea of just over the last 25 years how social media has played an incredible role. And I have to admit, I talked with one of the presenters from the earlier sessions, the idea that at a time when social media is allowing people to take more and more control of information, we seem to see us relinquishing more and more control over those decision-making factors within the food industry. We tend to buy food and consume food out of the home, buy from retail, we have food distributed to us, we eat ready to eat foods or commercially packaged foods, less and less of our consumers are eating food that they've grown themselves, they know where it came from, they know how it was processed, they know how it was packaged, and even knowing where they bought it from. So as we have relinquished a lot of control with food, we've taken back some of that control in terms of the information. And that social media, that awareness has not only increased stakeholder expectations and awareness, whether we're talking about food allergens, GMOs, so many different things that are of concern here today with food, but they've also empowered folks to share that information, to become a member or part of a group to go from being very passive to active and even to be generative in terms of being coming in advocate when it comes to food issues and awareness. So how does this involve blockchain? I work with many companies that are looking at blockchain, they're looking at technology today and how this can make an impact on the food industry. And my view is that far too many of these companies, they're looking at it for the right reason, but it's almost like the fact that they're looking at it at the wrong time. It's kind of like having faith in a superhero, but that superhero gets there after the meteor has hit the city or after the building has crumbled or the bridge has crumbled. We expect our superheroes to get there perhaps before to prevent the catastrophe. And so this idea of a reactive look at blockchain, because we can trace back, we can find where the problem came from, we can learn from this. Well, that's great, but what if we look at it in terms of a proactive sense? This is going to shift our curve a bit here. In essence, while looking at blockchain in a more predictive, analytical kind of a view, we can start looking for evidence. We can start looking for these issues to come up within our systems, much like the idea of the preventative maintenance, much like the idea of looking for those signs to make that change earlier rather than paying the cost in terms of systems being taken offline, in terms of having to recall those products, in terms of the increased liabilities and the decrease in options. But in fact, if we look at predictive analytics and search for that evidence and issue before it becomes an incident, a lot of things go away. We are now dealing with issues within companies before it becomes a public awareness, before social media takes hold of this issue, before we have a damage to our brand reputation, before our options become so limited that it's impossible to control. Now, I will admit that the complexity of this also grows. It is much more complex to deal with an event that you're thinking is theoretical, it's imagined, we're planning, we're predicting, and we're looking at this kind of theory to practice, but hopefully we don't have to practice, but the idea of all the information that goes into this, all the data, all the analytics, and all the investment, the prioritization, and the alignment of a mission. But the value, the value is so much more great. Think of how much value you're adding in terms of not having to deal with the damage to your brand reputation, or the damage due to court costs or fines, settlements. The idea of sure, there may be an economic impact if we have to deal with a recall or deal with an outbreak, but the cost of preventing it is so far less than the cost of trying to put that genie back in the bottle. It's always going to cost significantly less to be preventive than it is to deal with an outbreak or a massive recall after the fact. And finally, I think one of those kind of elements that are missing is that the value is not necessarily something tangible in terms of money, but the value in terms of those lives, those consumers that you're not putting in harm's way. Those consumers who are now able to say, I have confidence, I don't have to worry about this because I know that such efforts are taken, that I don't have to worry about the food that I put on my child's plate. I don't have to worry that the very food I need for my existence might take that away. And what I'm talking about here is nothing new. As early as 1906 after Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, the London Daily Times in their review said that the things described by Mr. Sinclair happened yesterday, are happening today, and will happen tomorrow and the next day until some Hercules comes to cleanse the filthy stable. And I don't know about you, but when I look at all these news or social media, the alerts about recalls and foodborne outbreaks, I think that this message is exactly true today as it was over 100 years ago. But we're not talking about a real Hercules, we're talking about this idea of Hercules in effort. The idea that this is something that requires an enormous amount of work, strength, and courage. When we look at blockchain as this golden ticket, we look at Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, all the technology that's put behind it, we're all talking about the collection of big data. Even social media essentially is that collection of big data. But what we really want is actionable information. And the difference between big data and actionable information is right here in this room. We're talking about human literacy. We're talking about people who ask the right questions at the right time, not the wrong questions after the fact all the time. We're talking about the idea of people who, their questions are based on understanding the true impact, the true burden of disease, understanding that sometimes cost and benefit analysis shows us a number, but that number pales in comparison to a face, a name, a story, a family. This idea that the hype in terms of the efficiency and transparency and this kind of element of predictive analytics is sometimes imbalanced when you look at the reality, if we're always looking at the numbers after the fact. If we recognize that the supply chain and distribution chain of food is so complex that there are economic barriers to every participant playing an equal role. We also know that blockchain is not going to make someone who is unethical more ethical overnight. Finally, the idea that the uniformity, not to sound like I'm making a pun about food, but if we're collecting apples and oranges in terms of data, it's very hard for us to communicate and share and actually find patterns within these numbers. This reality makes blockchain sound like perhaps less of a golden ticket. So we got to look at the intersection between data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. I'm very encouraged by the fact that I've heard this probably five times on this stage alone today. We need to look at the reality is that we can talk about economics, we can talk about litigation, we can talk about legislation, we can talk about so many different forms of technology. But the reality is that there are real people who made assumptions in terms of not only the quality, but the safety, the authenticity of foods. The idea that what they bought was actually what it said it was on the label. And unfortunately, this is never going to go away. The reality is there will always be concerns and facts behind those concerns in terms of the safety of our food. There will always be foodborne pathogens because there will always be bacteria. But we can improve the culture in which we not only prepare and manufacture and distribute and retail foods, we can even change consumer culture. The reality is whether you're talking about a child who became sick because they came into contact with someone else who was sick with E. Coli, the idea of someone who became sick because they bought something from a grocery store and that grocery store had already received or 50 days earlier notification from the government that that food was contaminated and they needed to remove from their shelves. But the store manager said, I don't have enough information to see that there's a real concern. So I'm going to continue to sell this. And they continued to sell that product until lawyers came knocking in the door and said that the little boy in the red hat at the bottom left corner died because of a product that you already told you should have taken off the shelves. The idea that a 70-year-old woman who was a professional dancer all her life becomes sick from eating a salad after church on a Sunday because she's a vegetarian, goes out with a group, and it turns out she got sick from a meat-borne pathogen. And the person who was preparing the salad didn't realize that there was a need to perhaps use a different knife and cutting board that he had just used to cut all the raw meat than prepare a salad. Ultimately, the reality is not every parent gets to take their child home from the hospital when they make the assumption that some foodborne illness from something they took for granted for far too long is going to end up killing that child, even if that child never actually ate the hamburger that made them sick. I thank you very much.