 Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome you all to our fourth annual EECS Juneteenth celebration. My name is Herbert Winfrey. I'm a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, otherwise known as the EECS Department. And I'll be your emcee for this event. This year's EECS Juneteenth celebration is being held in conjunction with the University-wide Juneteenth symposium, which is entitled Systems Check, Exploring Structural Solutions to Systemic Racism. In our EECS event, tech empowering our communities. We celebrate black engineers and scientists who are making a difference in our communities. We begin our program with a performance by linguistic professor, Jesse Greaser, of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black National Anthem, to perform it on the bird parallel on Central Campus. An arrangement of this anthem by Master's student, Carson Landry. My name is Jesse Greaser. I'm an associate professor of linguistics here at U of M and a former alum of the College of Alice and I, go blue, where I learned to play the carillon as an undergrad many years ago and I'm now one of the University carilloners. And today I'll be performing Lift Every Voice and Sing here on the Charles Barrett Carillon in the bell tower on Central Campus. Thank you. Thank you, Jesse, for that lovely performance of the Black National Anthem on the biggest instrument on campus. Next, we are pleased to present a message from Lieutenant Governor Garland Gilchrist and each alumnus who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2005 with dual bachelor's degrees in computer engineering and computer science. Hey, everyone. Lieutenant Governor Garland Gilchrist here. I am honored to be part of EECS' Juneteenth event on tech and empowering our communities. As an engineer by training, EECS has a special place in my heart. It was here that I realized I could use my training as an engineer to improve the lives of people I grew up with on the East side of Detroit, lowering barriers, creating equity and delivering real change. This Juneteenth, I encourage you to reflect on how you can apply the lessons you learn here at EECS in your own life, how you can build bridges between people, bring more voices to the table and connect your community to opportunity. We have a lot of work to do. The students of the University of Michigan give me hope. I know you are well prepared to demonstrate the Michigan difference in communities across our state and around the world. This Juneteenth, let us stand tall together for freedom, equality and justice for all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lieutenant Governor. And now I'd like to invite Taj Williams who's the DEI coordinator in CSC to give us a brief history of Juneteenth. Thank you. Juneteenth is the oldest national celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. The first enslaved Africans were brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The U.S. Congress officially outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, but the domestic trade grew. And by 1860, there were nearly four million people enslaved in America with the most living and cotton producing southern states. On September 22nd, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people in America. However, the civil war was in full swing and the southern states refused to acknowledge or comply with this proclamation. After the civil war ended in 1865, soldiers landed at Galvingston, Texas, the most remote of the slave states, bringing news that the war had ended and that the nearly and that the 250,000 still enslaved black people in the state were to be free. They delivered the news on June 19th, 1865, a date which became known as Juneteenth. The 13th Amendment, which officially ended slavery and protected against any legal challenges to the presidential order was ratified later that year. Juneteenth has been celebrated by the African-American community every since. And as of 2021, thanks to the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, it is now recognized as an official federal holiday. Today, Juneteenth celebrates African-American freedom and achievement with the goal of promoting and cultivating knowledge and appreciation of our African-American history and culture. Thank you. Thank you, Taj, for that history of Juneteenth. We now come to the core of our program, a series of presentations by people who are empowering and uplifting our Michigan communities through tech, whether by exposing middle school students robotics or helping improve energy efficiency in communities or by training and inspiring urban tech entrepreneurs. Our panelists are Leon Pryor, Madeleine Miller and David Tarver. While they're talking, we invite you to put comments in the chat. And if you have any questions, put them in the Q&A box. We'll take a few questions after each presentation and then conclude this portion of the program with more time for Q&A. Our first speaker, Leon Pryor, graduated from Michigan in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, is currently a senior video game producer for Madeleine. Building games for augmented and virtual reality headsets. Before that, he worked at Microsoft, where he helped launch the Xbox and Xbox 360 game consoles, as well as dozens of other video games. Outside of work, Leon is a passionate advocate for STEM enrichment in Detroit, where he co-founded the Motor City Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports over 100 robotics teams in Detroit. Leon is also the coach of two first robotics teams, one of which recently made history as a first Detroit public school to qualify for the world championships. Additionally, Leon was recognized as Michigan's first robotics coach of the year and was run up for the award at the world championships in Houston, Texas. I present you Leon Pryor. Thank you, Professor Winfield. I'm going to give me a second to share my screen. Great, so thank you for the wonderful introduction. I won't restate much of it here. Very proud of Michigan grad and very proud to be here today. But kind of these are my professional accolades, long-time history and games, but I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here today to talk about what I actually do off the clock. Click there. And that's working as a robotics coach. So I've had the honor of being a robotics coach of three teams. I'm currently the coach of two, middle school, foreign language immersion and cultural studies at Detroit Public School, as well as the school at Mary Grove, which is a STEM high school, STEM and social justice that is actually run in cooperation with the University of Michigan School of Education. And then lastly, I was at one point coach of a elementary school, first Lego League team as well. So I've kind of run the gamut. This year I had some great personal accolades and being awarded coach of the year at the state level and runner up at the world level, which is an absolute incredible honor. For me, a lot of this has been driven through being a parent. When I first got involved, my son was part of a robotics team that was not doing well and actually was really struggling. And I thought, hey, somebody with my extensive experience in engineering is well positioned to actually really make a difference here. So I decided to get involved and initially in a role of just helping out a little bit and then was quickly kind of crossed the creation of a black hole and then being the head coach of all of these teams. One of the things I just wanna kind of illustrate here is the difference that a professional engineer can make in terms of getting involved in these programs. These are just the awards of my middle school team, which was founded in 2018 where there were no awards and then you can see the long history afterwards of awards on the local state and even national level. So it's been an amazing journey, but what we've proven is that our youth in Detroit who are often overlooked are capable of achieving much as long as you give them guidance and tools to actually accomplish things. So I wanted to briefly touch on kind of how did I get here and how did I get into this position? And a big part of it is despite being an engineer, both my parents are educators. My mother taught elementary school and my father was a famous, Lee and prior senior, was a famous administrator in Cleveland, Ohio. In fact, he was the 12th principal assigned to desegregate Cleveland public schools after Brown versus Board of Education. So I grew up in a household where it was well understood that the social and economic power of education is huge and that we all have a collective responsibility to help those around us in that regard. That journey was reinforced actually at the University of Michigan in undergrad where I spent a lot of time in the Engineering Learning Resource Center where there was definitely a culture there of our students helping each other. If you had expertise and you're given filled, you were expected to help your peers. And I ended up being a tutor at the ELRC as we called it. And at one point in my senior year, I think I had 20 or 25 students that I was tutoring in EECS 280 at the time. But it was an opportunity to allow my expertise in talent and programming and actually share that with my peers. We returned to Detroit in 2012 and when we did, I noted that there was a need for someone like me and my skills because as I mentioned earlier and decided to get involved in some way with the youth and taking on the role of coach was a part of it. One of the things that I like to think about is my son kind of first had his initial bad experience. I told him that, look, I'll get involved and do something and I can't promise you what will win but we'll win something on some scale. So on the way on the plane to the national championship in April, we had a little bit of a laugh about the promise and it was definitely fulfilled in that regard. But it's interesting though. So the first time that I coached and we reached a state championship, this is actually our robot from that year. We were very proud of this robot did really well at the local levels but we were absolutely annihilated at the state level. There was just a much higher competitive bar and I didn't know what that bar was as a rookie coach and neither did my students. So that's kind of an expected pattern that we see for students and it really kind of made me question, hey, how do I fix some fundamental problems that we have? Some of those are really obvious, right? Like budget, right? Like the other teams had nicer equipment. It's just like, hey, throwing money at our problem is one of the easiest solutions that you have. But there was a coaching issue whereas we had two coaches on our team. We had a teacher who was at the school and myself. Other teams had four to 10 coaches. Coaching at the high school level, this is even worse. I mean, we routinely go up against teams that have 20 to 30 coaches where we have 15 students. So there's a fundamental problem there. But overall, among everything, the biggest issue is we were working alone. We were working by ourselves. So if I had had other people that I could talk to about robotics, I would have learned where the bar was. I would have learned how we could start correcting these things before we got to these competitions. So I was galvanized to fix this problem and enter the concept of the Motor City Alliance. In fact, the Motor City Alliance had not been named such, but this is actually the first gathering of the Alliance. There were six teams from around Detroit that I had met from coaches that were interested in working together and getting better collectively. But really getting into it, what is the Alliance? And the Alliance is a consortium of educators and professionals who are dedicated to advancing STEM through FIRST Robotics. FIRST Robotics is first stands for for the inspiration of science and technology. And it's an annual worldwide robotics competition for students through kindergarten all the way up through the 12th grade. There are different leagues, there's FIRST Lego League for elementary, FIRST Tech Challenge, which is middle school in Michigan and FIRST Robotics Challenge, which is for high school students. A FIRST season at the high school level is the equivalent to graduate level engineering courses. Of course, students are given a really difficult problem in January. They're given 10 weeks to solve that problem. They're given limited resources and very little information or guidance on how to go about solving that problem. So putting this kind of task in front of kids is daunting at first, but it's amazing how much they rise to the challenge. The state of Michigan is one of the largest and most prolific locations for FIRST Robotics in the entire world. We have more robotics teams in Michigan than football teams at both the middle and the high school level. And within that, Detroit teams have historically underperformed and that's for a variety of social and economic reasons. And the mission of the Motor City Alliance is to directly address that. So, you know, the alliance was formed, right? You know, my little Voltron joke here of all formed ahead. What had happened is while I was looking to build this consortium of other coaches of other people in Detroit so we could just minimally have a chat room where we could talk about these things. There were two other schools in the Metro Detroit area that had also been working in Detroit and they noticed that I was having success and they asked me to join their group. This was the Kinematic Wolves from Detroit Crystal Ray, FRC 5577 as well as Frog Force Team 503 from Novi. They invited me to the party. We had a great conversation and I immediately recognized that there was synergy here. There was synergy here with what they were doing and what I was planning. So here was a case where I could actually apply my corporate know-how and the work that I've done, particularly in Amazon. I really thought about the Amazon leadership principles, you know, think big, bias for action, invent and simplify and I kind of went nuts. We had a business entity formed within a couple of days. I started filing for non-profit status. I built a website, I built communication channels. I invested in tools such as Teams and really started to put an infrastructure in place so that we could actually work and service these kids. So how's it going? It's been an amazing journey. The Motor City Alliance today is a vastly respected entity, both within Detroit public schools, local robotics in Michigan and even the first in Michigan organization, the organization that basically runs first throughout all of the state, definitely looks at us as leaders and works with us very closely to provide programming. You know, we hold annual summer camps that improve the fundamentals of Detroit teams. Those are offered free to 10 teams every year and this year we're looking to double that. We host annual First Lego League and First Tech Challenge kickoff events where we get kids set up and ready for the season. We hold weekly help sessions. Most Detroit schools are closed and on the weekend and schools that don't use the weekend are just simply not putting enough hours in to be successful competitively. So we basically are opening up a space for them and we basically more than double their available engineering time. Our organization is mainly student driven. So we have middle school students mentoring elementary kids. We have high school students mentoring mentoring middle school kids. We've hosted a competition at an NCAA arena at the University of Detroit Mercy. We've gotten playing fields to all Detroit teams. We've more than doubled the budget, worked with the DPSCD to more than double the budget of all Detroit schools. We're forging college relationships at the University of Detroit Mercy and Wayne State. Our kids are doing well. And ultimately, this is an area where we look at Detroit where the average income in Wayne County is $27,000 a year. A six figure engineering job for these kids is a game changer for an entire family and can really change outcomes. Moving forward, we're looking to do the same with the high school level. I'm super happy to announce that we now have a relationship with the University of Michigan through Haley Hart at the Michigan Engineering Zone. She's a director who very much shares our vision and will be working with the MEZ this year. And in a personal note for my team, K9.0 Robotics, we have a new version of the Promise. The Promise 2.0 is where we're gonna try to get my team to the world championship in two years. So I wanna leave some time for questions, but here's some of our contact information for the Alliance, as well as the individual teams that I coach. We are on Facebook, the web, and Instagram. And that about covers it. So thank you. And do we have any questions? I'll ask a question. Are there any girls involved in the Fresh Robotics teams? It seems that it's been a very male dominated thing, but do you have any girls in the team? Very much so. My high school team is 50% female, and I would say 80% of my leads are on the team. So these are the students that help direct things from electrical, programming, mechanical. Most of my leads are female as well. So I personally make a good point, given the statistics that you see with women in STEM, starting to fall off in high school in particular, I push very hard. One interesting note I have about the FLL, the First Lego League, often you see Girl Scout troops who enroll in First Lego League, and they usually win. There is Girl Scouts are just awesome at that age. They're just frankly better at working together than boys, and they often dominate the competition. So I do make it a mission to make sure that I work to grow my female leaders and make sure that they feel welcome, which is something that often starts to fall off of the high school levels. But very much so, very much in my teams. That's wonderful. Great. Any other questions? We do have quite a variety of questions. Shall we go through those now or? I can, in an interest of time, I can try to go through these really quick. So can you speak to students about the role that student organizations played in my growth? For me, the National Society of Black Engineers, as well as CEMES, were absolutely critical for me in terms of having peers who excelled. And it also allowed an opportunity for me to share my experiences with others. For funding. For CEMES, the Society of Minority Engineering Students. Yes, yes. Sorry, I forgot about that. Accurate crazy. What have been the successful sources of funding for your efforts in first robotics? Do you have strategy? So Ford Motor Company, DTE, have been phenomenal supporters financially for us in Detroit. We also very actively seek funding from companies, individuals. I have a lot of friends and family who seriously donate to my teams as well, which has been very, very helpful. One of the things that my coaching staff for my high school team does is we have a PhD student who has taken on the role of working with students to actually raise funds for our team. We're also seeking quite a few grants as well to move things forward. It's for our challenges next year. We really wanna move forward with high school and really get the high schools and the success that we've seen in the middle school. We wanna start duplicating that at the high school level so that we can start to see our Detroit high schools become as strong as our middle school teams have become. And if you wanna get involved, someone's asking about how do I get involved? Please visit our websites. Please contact me, leon.prior at the MotorCityAlliance.org. I will answer you. I can help you. I can, we'd love to have your help on an organization level or even at an individual team level, whatever works for you. We are more than happy to take any assistance on it. All right, Bill, thank you so much. Leon, wonderful, wonderful presentation. There are any more questions, we'll save them for the end of the panel. I'll now introduce our third speaker, David Tarver, who is the founder and president of the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative. David is a successful entrepreneur and educator who has focused on community service for the past two decades. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan in electrical engineering and then worked at Bell Labs for several years. After Bell Labs, he launched Telecom Analysis Systems Incorporated, a high-tech telecom instrumentation business. He saw that company for $30 million and then later on working as group president for the buyer built a telecom business, the market value in excess of $2 billion. In 2014, he founded the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative which facilitates the creation of sustainable business solutions to important urban problems. David Tarver will now tell us about the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative and how it's helping Detroit. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Winful. I'm assuming you can hear me. So good afternoon. I hope we can keep things rolling here. And I certainly look forward to hearing the rest of Madeline's presentation. I was fascinated by it when we talked about it yesterday. So I'm gonna talk to you today about empowering urban entrepreneurs. I am currently serving as a lecturer honored to do so in the University of Michigan College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurship. I've been lecturing there since 2012. And I'm also serving as president, as Dr. Winful said, of the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative. And you can see my contact information there for any follow-up. As Dr. Winful alluded to, I didn't have a previous life. I grew up in Flint and attended the University of Michigan bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. And I went to work after college at an amazing place, AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Some of you may recognize this picture from a more recent phenomenon as a television program called Severance. And it is filmed in the building that I work in. It was an incredibly future-lifting place, great experience. And I worked there as a member of technical staff and later as a technical supervisor. But after seven years working at Bell Laboratories, I left because I had this burning desire from when I was a kid to start my own electronic business. So I recruited two African-Americans colleagues and we actually left Bell Labs. People thought we were crazy. We went and started this telecommunications instrumentation business in the basement of my home in Little Silver, New Jersey. This is one of my co-founders there. I'm on the left. I had a lot more hair then. Business took a toll. And then my co-founder Steve Moore, one of my co-founders Steve Moore on the right there, his hand is on top of our first product that was a telephone network emulation product. And we built this business over the course of 12 years. We grew to do business in about 20 to 25 countries throughout Asia, throughout Europe. And then 1995, we sold the business to a British multinational UK company. And after the earn-out associated with that sale was over, I had a lot of freedom. I had the freedom to do community service work that I had always been interested in doing and in just exploring and learning more about people and more about what makes the world tick, what makes people tick. So I returned to Flint from New Jersey. Our lab was located in New Jersey. I returned to Flint in 2007. And I didn't return to Flint. I returned to Michigan in 2007. And the Michigan that I returned to was very different from the one I left. And the Flint Michigan that I returned to or that was existing at the time was very different. I'm sure that you've heard about the water problems in Flint, med, tainted water and so forth. But in addition to that, just the housing stock was totally depleted. The industrial base was basically gone, largely gone by the time I came back. And so whereas Flint, when I was growing up there, had the second highest per capita income in the United States when I returned to Michigan, it was one of the poorest communities in the United States. And that bothered me a lot. And I was determined to do something about this to see if I could do something about it. But in the course of exploring this issue, I learned that the kinds of changes that occurred in Flint and Detroit and Pontiac and Saginaw and other legacy cities in Michigan, these new situations while they were severe and maybe more severe than in other places, they were not unique. I came to realize that the world is an urban place, 55% of the people in the world as of 2019 live in an urban community. And in the United States, 80% of the people live in an urban community and that percentage is growing. And so if we are going to be successful as a society, we have to effectively, we have to live together effectively and we have to solve the problems that occur and the challenges that occur in an urban community. So I started to dedicate myself to that challenge. And the reason that these challenges exist is because urban communities face disruption from a number of angles. One is by this rapidly advancing technology, witness, again, the situation in Flint and Detroit, rapidly changing auto industry, supply chains, technology made it possible for manufacturing to occur in a lot of different places and even overseas where labor rates were much lower. So technology played a role in that destruction, but also cultural and ethnic and class conflict played a role in that. I grew up in Flint during the 1960s and during that time was when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the open housing took place and there was a separation, a racial separation that occurred in Flint, a lot of white flight and then company flight. And that was also a factor in what the situation that evolved in Flint. And then we have environmental and health crises that are causing disruption for the city's witness, the recent pandemic, COVID pandemic, which have devastating effect on urban communities because these communities are where people live in closest proximity. So these urban communities face disruption, but on the flip side, the anti-vote because disruption is innovation. And if we look at the measures of communities, vitality, things like safety, nutrition, healthcare, education, housing, transportation and so on, we see that there's a role that innovation can play and entrepreneurship can play in addressing these issues. Leon was, Mr. Pire was just talking about first robotics and that is an education innovation that is at least having an impact there in Detroit. Madeline, what she is doing in terms of energy efficiency is affecting housing and housing security and economic security for people in urban communities. And so those are just two of the areas but innovation can play a role in all of these areas of community vitality. But we also find that these urban innovators have been a short supply. People are not aware of the opportunities to build careers by innovating in urban communities and those who are attentive will be so often lack the tools and the technology and the information that they need to be successful. So I decided that that is an area where I could help them contribute and try to bring some of my experience to bear. So in 2014, starting organization called Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative, it was actually started with a lot of help from the University of Michigan, the College of Engineering, the Center for Entrepreneurship. We held our first symposium back in 2014 and Thomas Zurbuckin, who was Associate Dean at the time, I think that was his title and he was also heading up something called Innovate Glue, a campus-wide effort to inject more entrepreneurial thought in the University of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Thomas Zurbuckin was headed that up. He was one of the key people behind the starting of this Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative and he spoke at our first symposium. The idea is that we envision a new generation of urban individuals and we wanna support those innovators whether they are in startup businesses or existing businesses, large or small, government agencies or NGOs, we want to facilitate more innovation and entrepreneurship throughout these communities as a way of addressing those areas of vitality that are often subject to your disruption. Another thing that came out of my growing awareness about urban innovation was a course that I developed starting in 2015 at the University of Michigan, and again with the cooperation of the Center for Entrepreneurship, I started a course called Urban Entrepreneurship Practicum. This is the cohort from the FAR 2022 class, but in this class, I pair teams of students with practicing urban entrepreneurs and the students get to learn what it's about, what it's like to try to solve an urban problem through entrepreneurial innovation and the businesses that we work with often get some food for thought and some structure to their efforts. And so that is our ongoing effort, that class is teaching that class starting the eighth year this fall. But we are now embarking on, so we've been doing this Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative since 2014, it's largely been an advocacy organization. We try to encourage people to think about urban entrepreneurship. We try to connect people with resources and we feel like now it's time to take things to the next level. And so we're in the process of launching what we call UEI Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative 2.0. And in this effort, we wanna build and empower a community of urban innovators who want to build this member community. And we're going to be researching, documenting and sharing business models that work to solve urban needs, whether they be here locally in Detroit or elsewhere in the US or elsewhere in the world. We wanna maintain member and venture profiles, be able to produce and share food and business, community assessments so that entrepreneurs who wanna work in a particular community can see what the needs of those communities are, what the potential, what the opportunities are. And we want to do more in the area of developing seminars and courses, building on the course that we have developed at the University of Michigan. And we wanna connect these aspiring and actual entrepreneurs with advice and resources. So you might ask, so why is this Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative of the organization to do these kinds of things? We have a commitment to urban communities. We wanna focus on urban communities. I don't think there's another organization that is so focused on using entrepreneurship and other persons to solve problems in these communities. We focus on improving urban mortality via entrepreneurial innovation. Rather than the typical kind of entrepreneurship education that starts with an idea and show people how to monetize what idea we want to start, we wanna encourage people to, even if they start with an idea, to go back and think about what the mean are you serving, what problem you may be addressing in that community and how they can be most effective at doing that. We voice a strategy of capacity building elaboration rather than by the achieve quick wins and start a kind of activity. Although, again, we have nothing to do with startups. Our clients would be startups and again, there's businesses, government agencies, community organizations and the people that we attract in terms of our four groups and then building out from there are gonna have familiarity with urban communities but also entrepreneurial experience and business experience. So, as we build this out, we think that there are benefits, continued benefits to the University of Michigan, College of Engineering because we develop urban focus instructional materials that are a key thing for a driver, for students who want to serve and work in urban communities, internship opportunities, research and collaboration opportunities, stronger connection for College of Engineering and Center for Entrepreneurship to Detroit and communities like Detroit into the emerging University of Michigan Center for Innovation effort that has taken place in Detroit. And we think that there's gonna be a greater opportunity for alumni, philanthropic support and government agency support of College of Engineering and Center for Entrepreneurship as a result of connection being seen taking an active role in addressing these urban community needs. So, where do we go from here with this urban entrepreneurship initiative? We are in the process of securing seed funding for this new approach for the organization. The organization is and has been a not-for-profit 501c3 organization in Michigan since 2014. We're going to be recruiting interns again as we did at the start of the organization to help us build out these new business models and business cases. We want to produce an exemplary urban focus business models that people can look at and say, here's how people are actually using innovation and entrepreneurship to solve a particular problem in an urban community and people can go in depth on that and see how it's being done. And maybe that will inspire them in whatever area they're working in. We've got to produce this urban entrepreneurship overview seminar, a one-day seminar that kind of evangelizes the notion of urban entrepreneurship. And as I mentioned before, we're going to provide these data analytics driven community dashboards that allow people to determine what's going on in communities with respect to these different community vitality measures. And we're going to be recruiting additional partners and funding support for the next stage for urban entrepreneurship initiative. So we really feel that this next reliant of urban entrepreneurship initiative 2.0 will further enhance the problem of life in urban communities. And we feel that that's a worthy goal. So I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all about this today. And certainly, you know, we were singing the last couple of years, Herb was playing the piano. Dr. Wimple was playing the piano. This is a different tape this year, but it's a really great thing that we're actually, we are ourselves moving from inspiration to action. And that is the same thing that urban entrepreneurship initiative is doing. So thank you very much. Thank you, David. Now, I have maybe one quick question. You showed a couple of pictures of participants. Yes. In your seminars. I don't think I saw a single black person in there other than you. Is that right? That was definitely accidental. I think if you if you look at the first slide, for example, let me go back here, you know, we're in urban community, so we're going to have a lot of different people participating in our events. But I'm still sharing, right? I believe you are. Let's see here. So anyway, last couple of slides. Yeah, the last couple of slides that was a team. That was a team from University of Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship that participated in the symposium we did. And we had competition between student teams formulating solutions for urban community. And that happened to be the team from the University of Michigan that we were a picture with that particular team, one that particular competition on that night. But one thing I would say about this, you know, we are, you know, what I have found is that when people are focused on, when the objective is to solve problems for people in urban communities, I think you see a really good representation that looks a lot like the people from those communities. But at the same time, I want to stress that we as an urban entrepreneurship initiative, we welcome anybody who wants to focus on solving problems or improving the quality of life in urban communities. And so, you know, I think if you look at entrepreneurship in urban communities in the past, there's been a feeling of we want to just have business activity, right? And we want to have business activity by people of color or whatever. In this case, we want to focus on the beneficiaries of that activity, the people in the community. So if there is a group or an entity that has a business that's focused on solving problems in urban communities, they're not black, they're not Hispanic, that's fine. Again, we want to encourage multicultural solution and solve the issues that these communities are facing. Whoever solves it, we're welcoming that. So all hands on date, that's it for me. Definitely. But I think that maybe I didn't choose appropriately representative pictures. That particular picture was from, again, the symposium we held in Flint in 2060. And there were lots of people of color represented in that activity. Thank you very much, David. Our next speaker, Madeleine Miller, is the founder and CEO of Nextiles, a Detroit-based textile recycling company that converts textile waste into building installation. The professional background focuses on reducing textile waste and its harmful impacts to our natural environment. Her company specializes in creating secondary uses for textiles and engaging more Detroiters in creating circular economy solutions. She's an alumna of Spellman College and earned a master's degree in coastal zone management from the University of Miami's Rosin Steel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. She's currently a PhD student at the University of Michigan School for the Environment and Sustainability, studying in the Urban Energy Justice Lab. Madeleine's passion lies in empowering young black people and people of color to embrace environmentally sustainable behaviors. Let's welcome Madeleine Miller. Thank you, Dr. Winful, for that awesome introduction. I am going to share my screen. All right, thank you again, Dr. Winful, for that. And my presentation for this afternoon will focus on energy efficiency and corresponding upgrades for residential utility customers in Detroit. Just to give a brief overview, energy efficiency is the use of less energy to produce the same result. And for residential utility customers, energy efficiency means lower costs to heat and cool buildings, increased health benefits, greater grant reliability, and access to technology. And some of the challenges were lack of awareness of potential savings on the part of customers and landlords, uncertainty about how to implement upgrades, and of course, high costs of implementing them initially. Next slide, please. So again, across Michigan Home Energy Scores, which are Department of Energy scores from one through 10 of a home's efficiency, almost all Michigan homes require insulation upgrades and the average score is between two and three. Again, 80% of Detroit's housing stack was built before 1960. And so there are many needs along the retrofitting spectrum. And then 30% of Detroit households experience high energy burden, where low-income families spend about 8.6% of their income on energy costs. And in the case of the community that this project focuses on, 63% of study participants are making trade-offs between basic necessities like food and medicine in order to pay energy bills. Next slide, please. And so this project takes place in the villages at Parkside is a low-income housing community on Detroit's east side comprised of one to five bedroom townhomes. And I've included some demographics on this slide, but it's important to note that the average annual income for these residents is less than $20,000. Friends of Parkside is a nonprofit located within this community that we are partnering with for this project. And their priorities are around youth engagement, tech and connectivity, food distribution, among some other really important initiatives. And their board of directors is comprised of residents and community reps that we've been fortunate enough to work really closely with. Next slide, please. So in July of 2022, our University of Michigan team, which is made up of professors from the school of public health, students from the engineering school and students from the school for environment and sustainability. We hosted an initial energy efficiency recruitment workshop to get people involved and communicate that they were eligible for these upgrades. And beginning in August of 2022, we partnered with Walker Miller Energy Services for them to install LED light bulbs, kitchen and bathroom faucet aerators, hot water pipe, pipe wrapping, excuse me, Wi-Fi enabled thermostats and stainless steel energy star refrigerators into the units of these participants. And we've been hosting post-intervention workshops to collect feedback and find out how they're enjoying their upgrades and if they feel like they're saving and also collecting actual gas and electricity usage data. And so this summer, we will analyze that consumption data and we have a really exciting opportunity to conduct home energy scores at that property to inform the need for deeper retrofits like insulation. Next slide, please. So as we work to create strategies for analyzing the data from this project, we maintain a really strong relationship with the community. And here I've included a diagram of some of the potential benefits from just one of the upgrades installed for these residents, which is the energy star refrigerator. And those benefits are less energy consumed, a better in-home aesthetic where these residents are transitioning from dated white appliances to stainless steel appliances and then a healthier food storage environment and better food visibility. Next slide, please. So in addition to really old housing stock, Detroit, like many other cities, has challenges managing its manufacturing waste. And when it comes to textiles, globally, 80% of them are doomed for landfill or incineration at end of life. And both synthetic and natural fibers can take many years to decompose in a landfill and leak harmful chemicals in the process. And so textile waste management solutions are becoming increasingly important. The growth of textile waste is outpacing every other major waste category and global consumption is expected to increase 63% by 2030. In Detroit specifically, our automotive and fashion manufacturing sectors are driving our textile waste generation. Next slide, please. Next Tiles is a local textile waste company based in Detroit. It's actually my company and we collect textile waste from local manufacturers. And some of our uses for that waste are residential building installation, shoddy for manufacturing furniture, pet accessories and other items that need stuffing, essentially. And we cycle a lot of the waste we collect back into Detroit's local design ecosystem. Next slide, please. So in terms of impact, during 2022, which was our first full year of collecting and picking up and figuring out our strategies, we've recycled more than 100,000 pounds of textile waste. We also had an opportunity to continue lessening greenhouse gas emissions by diverting that waste from landfills and incinerators, creating local jobs and exploring innovative ways to create products from the waste we collect and to provide residential building installation to help lessen heating and cooling bills for local residents. And right now we are selling to DIY markets and tiny home producers. But this summer, we're hosting students from Clark Atlanta University and Michigan State University who are helping us continue our research such that our product will be available in big box retail stores like Home Depot. Next slide, please. So to sort of bring things home here, the villages at Parkside presents a larger opportunity to explore the dual energy efficiency benefits of creating secondary uses from local manufacturing waste. And those benefits are one, the environmental benefits of simply diverting waste from landfill and two, the potential energy and cost savings from recycled content building installation used to retrofit multifamily properties like the villages at Parkside. And through this community-based participatory research project with TVP, we've gained a deeper understanding of the energy experience and the needs for multifamily housing residents where many energy efficiency programs that offer free upgrades are catered to single-family residents. And so our plan is to continue implementing small energy conserving measures and technologies at this property, but also to work to understand their need to receive deeper energy efficiency retrofits. And I'm hopeful that next-house installation product will be a solution for this property and for others going forward. That is my last slide. Thank you all so much for listening and being patient with my Wi-Fi challenges. And I'll open for questions now. I do have a question. How do you convert the textiles that you collect into installation? Do you have a factory? What is the process? Yes, and I'm sorry for speeding through and not getting into that more. We do have a warehouse space. We're actually stationed in Focus Hope's headquarters in Detroit. And we used an industrial granulator to convert materials from small scraps, rows of fabric, and things like that to shoddy. And we were actually fortunate enough to receive a grant from Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to purchase that equipment. That's wonderful. Thank you. Great work you're doing. Are there any questions in the Q&A box? Improving energy efficiency in homes comes with often high capital costs. Do you have any ideas on how to address this inequity to Madeleine? Well, I think for the purpose of Nextile's product, and I mean, I think this is the case with many recycled content products aside from energy efficiency, they come at a high initial cost. And for this project specifically, the fact that we're sourcing our manufacturing waste locally and traditionally, we don't try to be price competitive with landfill, but for the purpose of diverting Michigan waste from landfill, we're making an effort to do that. And in some cases, even taking this waste on, at no cost to these manufacturers, but they're also in some cases not charging us, which allows us to manufacture the products at a cost that's more feasible to implement on a larger scale in cities like Detroit where so many homes need retrofits. And I will quickly go to question number two. Is there a way for individuals to donate their old textiles for this project? So right now, we focus primarily on pre-consumer waste for manufacturers, but we recently launched a nonprofit arm of the business called Nextile's Cares, specifically for post-consumer waste. In the coming months, we will be doing lots of outreach to Detroiters and people all over Southeast Michigan to let them know that we're accepting post-consumer donations. So we're really excited about that. Great, and final question. What advice do you have for students who are interested in pursuing an entrepreneurial path? So I always tell people that, as sad of a time as the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was, it gave me an opportunity to connect with people because we were all at home. And I was calling people who otherwise wouldn't have had time to answer the phone, but it also really helped me to understand the importance of relationships. And I think my entrepreneurship journey has really been propelled by people who have been willing to support me, help me find capital, and kind of get down and dirty with me when it comes to the textile industry and sourcing waste and things like that. So just to really lean on relationships and tap into, of course, Tech Town and so many of the other entities that exist to help support small businesses across Michigan. And actually I'm going to throw in one more question because it was a student guess, so I wanna get the question in. Are there current opportunities for students to get involved? Yes, so right now our internship applications are closed and we're about a month into the engagement that we have with interns this summer, but we welcome students to reach out. I think I had a slide with some contact information, but if there's a way aside from an internship that a student wants to get involved, shadow, come to our space and become familiar with some of the materials that we're processing or even help us sort in some fashion, we welcome that. And there's always, there's an internship tab on our website. So when we do open a new round of internship opportunities, they will be on nexttiles.org. Great, thank you so much, Bradley. And thank you to all the panelists. They're wonderful presentations about how to empower our communities using Tech. I would now like to welcome the leaders of the two divisions of EECS who will present panel reports regarding climate, diversity, equity and inclusion in the two divisions of the department. We'll first hear from Professor Michael Wellman, the chair of computer science and engineering. And then we'll hear from Professor Heath Hoffman, the associate chair for graduate affairs in electrical and computer engineering. Please, Michael. Yes, thank you, Herb. I am Michael Wellman, chair of computer science and engineering. The Juneteenth celebration is an important way to help us recognize and reflect upon the challenges that black individuals in our field still face and the steps we need to take as a community to effect change. CSE's annual climate and DEI report is our way of tracking our efforts as well as our progress or lack thereof. It documents the work our faculty, staff and students have performed over the past year. And thus the series of reports provides valuable data for assessing and improving our efforts from year to year. Included in the report are detailed summaries of student enrollment and faculty recruiting data as well as summaries of CSE's new undergraduate mentorship program, our increased investment in recruiting activities at Michigan community colleges and improvements to student experience in our intro level courses. Expanding these and other efforts is central to CSE's vision of the future. The report is publicly available on the CSE climate and DEI website and is now being linked in the chat. Okay, thank you. CSE and ECE operate cooperatively but independently. So our report is just for CSE. I will now let Heath Hoffman talk about ECE's document. Thank you, Michael. Hello, everyone. My name is Heath Hoffman and I'm the Associate Chair of Graduate Affairs and Electrical and Computer Engineering here at Michigan. Today celebrates an important moment in our history but it also serves as a reminder of how far we still have to go in order to achieve true equality for all. We know that an important part of equality is opportunity and representation. We are committed to achieving greater diversity in the department and have been working hard towards this goal. As part of that process, we have been partnering with faculty and staff throughout Michigan engineering to ensure a community of inclusion and support for our students. Our 2023 annual report on ECE's efforts and metrics including black student and faculty recruitment, retention and placement is available online we'll put a link to that report in the chat now. So thank you again for attending and celebrating with us and a special thank you to the students, alumni and faculty who participated in today's event. Thank you very much. Thank you both for the update. Now, before we end, I would like to remind you that the University's Juneteenth Symposium continues with a few more events this afternoon. These include the closing keynote presentation with systemic racism in our institutions. And then there's also a black film festival and a top of the park event for children. Please check the chat for more information about these events. This brings us to the end of our ECE Juneteenth celebration. I apologize for the technical hiccups but I hope you all enjoyed this event. I thank you all for attending and have a great weekend.