 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for our ongoing coverage of the Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Conference. It's our first year covering the event. It's actually the first year for the event, the inaugural year for the events. So we're really excited to get into this. It's basic research that drives a whole lot of innovation and we're really excited to have our next guest. He is Kazuhiro Gomi. He is the president and CEO of NTT Research. Kazuh, great to see you. Hi, good to see you. Yeah, so let's jump into it. So this event, like many events, was originally scheduled, I think, for March at Berkeley. Clearly, COVID came along and you guys had to make some changes. So I wonder if you can just share a little bit about your thinking in terms of having this event, getting this great information out, but having to do it in a digital way and kind of rethinking the conference strategy. Sure, so NTT Research, we started our operations about a year ago, July 2019. And I always wanted to show the world that to give an update of what we have done in the areas of basic and the fundamental research. So we plan to do that in March, as you mentioned. However, you know, the rest of it, to some extent, history, we needed to cancel the event and then decided to do this time of year through virtual. Something we learned, however, not everything is bad by doing this virtual. We can certainly reach out to so many people around the globe at the same time. So we're taking, I think, trying to get the best out of it. Right, right. So you've got a terrific lineup. So let's jump into a little bit. So first thing, just about NTT Research. You know, we're all familiar if you've been around for a little while about Bell Labs. You know, we're fortunate to have Xerox Park up the street here in Palo Alto. You know, these are, you know, kind of famous institutions doing basic research. People probably aren't as familiar, at least in the States, around NTT basic research. But when you think about real bottom-line basic research and how it contributes, ultimately it gets into products and solutions and healthcare and all kinds of places. How should people think about basic research and its role in ultimately, you know, coming to market in products and services and all different things? But you're getting way down into the weeds, into the really, really basic hardcore, you know, technology. Sure. So let me just, from my perspective, define the basic research versus some other research and development. For us that the basic research means that we don't necessarily have any, like a product roadmap or commercialization roadmap. We just want to look at the fundamental core technology of all things. And from the timescale perspective, obviously not that we are not looking at something new, you know, thing next year, next six months, that kind of thing. We are looking at five years or sometimes longer than that, potentially 10 years down the road. But you mentioned about Bell Lab and Xerox Park. Yet, well, there used to be such organizations in the United States. However, well, arguably those days have kind of gone. But, so that's what's going on in the United States. In Japan, NTT has have done quite a bit of basic research over the years. And so we wanted to, I think because that a lot of the cases that we can talk about, you know, end of the morse laws. And then, you know, we are kind of scary time for that energy consumptions on the ITs. We need to make some huge, big fundamental change has to happen to sustain our, you know, long-term development of the ITs. And then basically for the sake of human beings. Right, right. So NTT sees that and also we've been doing quite a bit of basic research in Japan. So we recognize this is the time that the lets expand this activities. And then by doing, as a part of doing so is open up the research lab in Silicon Valley where certainly we can really work better, work easier to with the global talents in this field. So that's how we started this endeavor, like I said, last year. And so far it's a tremendous progress that we have made. So that's where we are. That's great. So just, you know, a little bit more specific. So you guys are broken down into three labs, as I understand, you've got the physics, the PHI, which is physics and informatics, the CIS lab, cryptography and information security and the MEI lab, medical and health informatics. And the conference has really laid out along those same tracks. Really day one is a whole lot of stuff or excuse me, day two, around the physics and informatics, the next day is really cryptography and information security and then the medical and health informatics. So those are, you know, super interesting, but very diverse, you know, kind of buckets of fundamental research. And you guys are attacking all three of those pillars. Yep. So day one, a general session is that we cover the whole, all the topics. But just a whole general topics, I think some people want to understand, those who want to understand what entity research is all about, so in day one will be a great day to be to understand more holistic what we are doing. However, given the type of research topic that we are tackling, we need the deep dive conversations. Very specific to each topic by the specialists and the experts in each field. Therefore, we have day two, three and four for specific topics that we're going to talk about. So that's the configuration of this conference. Right, right. And I love, I just have to read a few of the session breakout titles because I think they're just amazing and I always love learning new vocabulary words. Coherent non-linear dynamics and combinatorial optimization. Langrage multipliers. Indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions. Fully deniable communications and computations. I mean, a brief history of the quasi-adaptive NICKS, which I don't even know what that stands for. Really some interesting topics. But the other thing that jumps out when you go through the sessions is the representation of universities and really the top flight universities. So you've got people coming from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Notre Dame, Michigan. The list goes on and on. Talk to us about the role of academic institutions and how NTT works with and in conjunction with academic institutions and how at this basic research level kind of the commercial academic interests align and come together and work together to really move this basic research down the road. Sure, so working with academic, especially the top-notch universities are crucial for us. Obviously, that's where that experts in each field of the basic research doing their super activities and we definitely need to get connected and then we need to accelerate our activities and together with the NTT's researchers. So that has been kind of one of the number one priority for us to jumpstart and get some going. So as you mentioned, Jeff, that we have lineups of professors and the researchers from each top-notch universities joining to this event and talking at different sessions. So I'm sure that those who are listening in to those sessions, you will learn what's going on from the NTT's mind or NTT researchers' mind to tackle each problem. But at the same time, you will get to hear that top-level researchers and professors in each field. So I believe this is going to be a kind of unique sort of a session that to understand what it's like in a research field of quantum computing, encryptions, and then medical informatics of the world. So I'm sure it's going to be a pretty great lineups that you get to. Yeah. Absolutely, a lot of information exchange and I'm not going to ask you to pick your favorite child because that would be unfair, but what I am going to do is I noticed too that you were also right for the Forbes Technology Council member. So you're publishing on Forbes and one of the articles that you published relatively recently was about biological digital twins. And this is a topic that I'm really interested in. We used to do a lot of stuff with GE and there was always a lot of conversation about digital twins for turbines and motors and kind of all this big, heavy industrial equipment so that you could get ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating maintenance and basically run simulations of its lifetime. Neat concept. Now, and that's applied to people in biology, whether that's your heart or maybe it's a bigger system, your cardiovascular system or the person as a whole. I mean, that just opens up so much interesting opportunities in terms of modeling people and being able to run simulations. If they do things different, I would presume, eat different, walk a little bit more, exercise a little bit more. And you wrote about it. I wonder if you can share kind of your excitement about the potential for digital twins in the medical space. Sure, so I think that the benefit is very clear for a lot of people, I would hope that the ones basically the computer system can simulate or emulate your own body, not just the generic human body, it's the body for Kazugomi at the age of whatever. And so if you get that precise simulation of your body, you can do a lot of things. Oh, you meaning I think a medical professional can do a lot of things. You can predict what's gonna happen to my body in the next year, six months, whatever. Or if I'm feeling sick or whatever, the reasons, and then the doctor want to prescribe a few different medicines, but you can really test it out, different kind of medicines, not to you, but to the twin, the medical twin, then obviously I'll be safer to do some kind of, some specific medicines or whatever. So anyway, those are the kind of visions that we have. And I have to admit that there's a lot of things, technically, we have to overcome and it will take a lot of years to get there. But I think it's a pretty good goal to define. So we said we did it, and I talked with a couple of different experts and I am definitely more convinced that this is a very nice goal to set. However, well, just talking about the goal, just talking about those kind of futuristic thing, you may just end up with a science fiction. So we need to be more specific. So we have certain researchers breaking down into different pieces, how to get there. Again, it's going to be a pretty long journey, but we are starting from the try to get the digital twin for the cardiovascular system. So basically that creates your own heart. And again, the important part is that this model of my heart is very similar to your heart, Jeff, but it's really not identical. It is somewhat different. Right, right. So we are looking on it and there are certainly some, we're not the only one thinking something like this. There are definitely like-minded researchers in the world. So we are gathered together with those folks and then come up with exchanging the ideas and coming up with that, the plans and ideas. That's where we are. But like you said, this is really an exciting goal and an exciting project. Right, and I like the fact that you consistently in all the background material that I picked up preparing for this today, this focus on tech for good and tech for helping the human species do better down the road. And another topic and another blog post you talked about and specifically what are 15 amazing technologies contributing to the greater good? And you highlighted cryptography. So there's a lot of interesting conversations around encryption and depending, kind of commercialization of quantum computing and how that can break all the existing kind of encryption. And there's going to be this whole renaissance in cryptography. Why did you pick that amongst the entire palette of technologies you can pick from? What's special about cryptography for helping people in the future? Okay, so the encryption, I think most of the people just when you hear the study of encryption, you may think that the goal of these researchers, you may think that you want to make your that encryption more robust and more difficult to break. You can probably imagine that's the type of research that we are doing. And yes, we are doing that, but that's not the only direction that we are working on. We, our researchers are working on different kind of encryptions and basically encryptions controls that the who, well, you can just reveal, say part of the data being encrypted or depending upon that kind of attribute of whoever has the key, that information being revealed are slightly different. Those kind of encryption, well, it's kind of hard to explain verbally, but functional encryption they call is becoming a reality. And I believe those inherent data itself has that protection mechanism and also controlling who has access to the information is one of the keys to address that the current status, current status, what I mean by that is that more connected world we are going to live and more information are created through IOTs and all that kind of stuff, more sensors out there. I think, so it is great on the one side that we can do a lot of things, but at the same time, there's tons of concerns from the perspective of privacy and securities and stuff. And then how to make those things happen together while addressing the concern and leverage or the benefit, well, you can create super complex accessing systems, but those things, I hate to say that, but there are some inherently bringing in some vulnerabilities and break at some point, which we don't want to see. So I think that having those securities and privacy mechanism in that file itself and is I think that one of the key to address those issues again, get the benefit of that connectedness and then while maintaining and then maintaining privacy and security for the future. So, and then that's, in the end, will be the better for everyone and the better society. So I could pick other technology, but I felt like this is easier for me to explain to a lot of people. So that's mainly the reason that I went that direction. Right, well, you keep publishing, so I'm sure you'll work your way through most of the technologies over a period of time, but it's really, it's good to hear you know, there's a lot of talk about security, not enough about privacy. There's usually the regs and the compliance laws lag, what's kind of happening in the marketplace. So it's good to hear that that's really a piece of the conversation because without the privacy, you know, the other stuff is not as attractive and we're seeing all types of issues that are coming up and the regs are catching up. So privacy is a super important piece. But the other thing I think is so neat is to be exposed, not being an academic, not being in this basic research every day, but have the opportunity to really hear at this level of detail the amount of work that's being done by big brain smart people to move these basic technologies along. We deal often in kind of higher level applications versus the stuff that's really going on under the cover. So really a great opportunity to learn more and hear from and probably understand some, understand not all about some of these great, you know, kind of baseline technologies, really good stuff. Yep. Yeah, so thank you for inviting us for the first one and we'll be excited to sit in on some sessions and I'm going to learn what's that one phrase that I got to learn via N-I-K-Z-T, N-I-Z-K-S. N-I-Z-K-S. Yeah, N-I-Z-K-S, the brief history of quasi-adaptive in I-Z-K-S. Oh, right, yeah, yeah. All right, Kazoo, I'll give you the final word. You've been working on this thing for over a year, you know, I'm sure you're excited to finally kind of let it out to the world. I wonder if you have any final thoughts you want to share before we send people back off to their sessions. Well, let's see. I'm sure if you are watching this video, you are almost there for that actual summit. It's about to start and so I hope you enjoyed the summit and in a physical, well, I mentioned about that the benefit of this virtual, you know, we can reach out to many people, but obviously there's also a flip side of the coin as well, with physical, we can get more spontaneous conversations and more in-depth discussion. Certainly we can do it, perhaps not today, it's more difficult to do it, but yeah, I encourage you to, I think I encourage my researcher's entity side as well to basically communicate with all of you potentially, hopefully, then, you know, to have more in-depth meaningful conversations just starting from here. So just feel comfortable, perhaps, just feel comfortable to reach out to me and then all the other MPP folks and then also that researchers from other organizations, I'm sure they're looking for this type of interactions moving forward as well. Terrific, well, thank you for that open invitation and you heard it, everybody, reach out and touch base and communicate and engage and it's not quite the same as being physical in the halls, but you can talk to a whole lot more people. So, Kazu, again, thanks for inviting us, congratulations on the event and really glad to be here covering it. Yeah, thank you very much, Jeff, I appreciate it. All right, thank you. He's Kazu, I'm Jeff, we are at the upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.