 Thank you. Here we are. We just started recalling Jennifer. It's great to have you here. Left the stage straight to you. It's a great pleasure to have you. It's a very interesting topic. Stages just might be. And start speaking. Not much for intros. All right. No, not a problem. Thank you so, so much. It is an honor to be here and hopefully I will not bore anybody to tears. It's actually kind of an interesting intersection between technology and water. So I am hoping to be able to bring some of the information and insight that happens in my world to the tech sector. And that's kind of one of the things that we really wanted to be able to do with this talk today. So if you have any questions since I'm going to be doing sharing my screen for the slideshow, I won't be able to see the chat unless I purposely go look at it. But feel free to just kind of chime in at the end with any questions or if there's something burning that you have about that particular slide. Feel free to interrupt me. So this way it's a good conversation going throughout. So without further ado, we are going to start things off. Yes, I know. Go away. There we go. All right. So awesome. We see your screen. Fantastic. There we go. All right. So basically, this is a little bit different than what some of the previous talks have been about. I'm still going to hit on sustainability as the previous speaker mentioned a few weeks ago. But it's looking at something that we don't normally think about in supply chain management or especially not in trade finance, but it has something to do with both of those. And that's treating water and sanitation as a supply chain. So I'm not only laboratory manager for wastewater utility, which you can see my bat cave behind me with all sorts of things bubbling and going. But also in May of 2020, I founded my own company, Intelligent Water Services. And it was looking at a lot of things that I had kind of picked up over the years as there has to be a better way of doing this. We can tackle these challenges if we look outside the box. And that spurred me to start IWS. So just kind of, you know, linked in on a slide. I'll be your tour guide for Water Industry 101. Please keep all arms and legs inside the tram car at all times. Long story short, I'm a water nerd. I am a classically educated marine biologist and environmental scientist. I have made a life studying biology, chemistry, microbiology, molecular biology. I was doing PCR before wastewater epidemiology became a thing. It's something that I've really enjoyed doing. I have a passion for water and for the science of clean water and taking dirty water and turning it into clean water. So just a quick rundown. Right after graduation, I was fortunate enough to be able to get this job here at RTM UA. It really helped kind of open my eyes to a lot of the real world scenarios. The true-to-life situations where I was learning about stuff in school and that was great. But in order for me to be able to really understand how are these concepts applied in real life? How are all of the cool chemistry things that I'm learning about, all the cool microbes that I'm learning about? Well, what are they doing out in the real world? It's great that I can see them in a Petri dish, that I can see them in a glass culture dish. But what role do they have to play? And that's kind of what this job has allowed me to do. It's given me that tangible hands-on understanding. So how does that jump to blockchain and supply chain management and looking at my passion, looking at water as a tradable thing and as something needing to be tracked? The actual story is kind of funny. I didn't start going down the blockchain rabbit hole until 2018. And you'll see on here 2018 Unleash Innovation Lab. So there's a United Nations program called Unleash Innovation Lab that every year they partner with several different organizations around the world. Every year they send a thousand students and young professionals. And at the time I was still a young professional to a various place. A thousand YPs from around the world all gather to tackle the sustainable development goals. And if you have no idea what those are, don't worry, I'm going to be going over them in just a moment. But basically it's looking at how to be a good human by the year 2030. So the professional water industry that I'm a part of sent me over there as part of the delegation to look at SDG6, which is water and sanitation. So first of all, just being with that many brilliant people from all around the world, from Africa, from all over Europe, from Australia, New Zealand, the Arab countries, it was absolutely amazing. Just that much brain power under one roof was pretty incredible. So I get over there. We start talking just kind of with our neighbors because none of us really know each other. But we know it's like, hey, we're a thousand nerds about all sorts of other cool stuff. What do you do? What do you do? Where are you from? So there's this big opening ceremony, dignitary, celebrities, really, really cool stuff. One of the speakers makes the joke at the time that I didn't realize what was going on that, oh, blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, it's going to cure all humanities ills too bad, nobody actually knows what it is. And everybody kind of around me starts giggling. And I'm like, okay, I have no idea what's going on. But sure. And I'm just kind of laughing at a FOMO, fear of missing out, because everybody else around me is laughing. So I'm going to start laughing too. So I didn't really know what they were talking about. I'm like, hi, I'm a biologist. I'm a water nerd. If you start asking me about what bacteria is doing something that I can answer that I get. But the thing about blockchain just whoosh right over my head. So over the course of Unleash, over the course of my next two weeks, and this was in Singapore, which is just absolutely one of my favorite places on the planet. I want to try and get back there someday. So it was a lot of technology available to us, a lot of very knowledgeable people who were well versed in a lot of this high tech stuff. So over the course of the two weeks over there, just through just random side shatter, I found out what blockchain was. And I was like, oh, okay, like I had heard of Bitcoin, I kind of knew what it was. It's like, oh, you know, digital currency to me, it was like that same level of the credit system from Star Wars. I was like, all right, you know, sure, whatever. But once I found out about the underlying technology to blockchain and smart contracts, and I heard about it for the first time in supply chain management, from a team that was working on a different SDG, looking at sustainability in textiles in fashion and fabric, I was like, oh, oh, that's cool. That's something I can get behind that has really, really good potential. You know, that's kind of where I jumped on the blockchain bandwagon, so to speak. That was my first venture down to that rabbit hole. And since then, it's been, you know, kind of toying this idea and rolling it around in my head, like, okay, you know, what if we started looking at water and wastewater treatment as a supply chain, similar to what a, you know, an organic cotton fabric would have to go through and look at that as something that can be tracked as something where water rights could be traded, where we would need to look at the finances associated with that, look at the tracking associated with that and the logistics for it. And so I kind of, you know, tucked that in the back of my head, went on with Unleash, came back to my utility, did a whole lot of other stuff. I'm an adjunct instructor. But also when I came back from Unleash, my utility was in crisis. So little FYI about wastewater treatment, we are pretty much dependent on those microbes that I had briefly mentioned earlier, you know, all of those bacteria, the protozoa, all of those microscopic things. Yeah, sure, we add chemicals to the water. We allow, you know, some physical manipulation of it for the large stuff to settle out and all of that. But the real stars of the show are the microbes. And if we get something that is toxic to those microbes, similar to exposure to water that's toxic to humans, if we get something in that's toxic to those microbes, they're done. And our treatment capability is also done, which means we are basically releasing not fully treated sewage to the environment, to the open water, which nobody likes to do. So unfortunately, when I came back from Unleash, we were in one of these times. And, you know, it's like, okay, well, let's see what's going on. You know, my boss is like, here, do this, this, this, this, and just for, you know, putting out the fire. Once we put out the fire, which it took three months to recover from this one particularly bad discharge, we lost $100,000 in additional revenue, we totally burned our treatment capacity, we had to wrestle with the environmental regulators, and it was a mess. So I started thinking there has to be a better way of doing this. And that's when I kind of started putting those pieces together, you know, again, well, what if we started looking at water and wastewater as that supply? So decided, you know, after some brief conversation with some people in the water side of things, hey, is this possible? And after some brief conversations from my new Unleash friends, hey, is this possible? Both sides said it's never been done before, but we don't see why not. So I was like, okay, let's roll the dice and give it a shot. So in May of 2020, like I said, I founded IWS. In 2021, I was fabulously down the blockchain rabbit hole. And I was actually fortunate enough to be a selected as a participant in the Frankfurt School of Business and Finance to be a DLT talent or a distributed ledger program talent. It's a female focused boot camp style program in blockchain. So that kind of, you know, solidified my credentials, you could say, in the tech and the blockchain space. And most recently, I had also completed a program on the water side of things in facility leadership, which again, just helps me understand even more so how this type of technology can be plugged into the water space. So I mentioned some of those sustainable development goals. Basically, in September of 2015, the United Nations held the UN Sustainable Development Summit and came up with 17 goals for what the world can do better by the year 2030. Obviously, this was pre-pandemic. So, you know, things have certainly shifted since then. And unfortunately, we are even more so behind the eight ball than we were before. But you'll see the 17 goals, they interact with each other. You know, no poverty does not exist in a vacuum. Water and sanitation does not exist in a vacuum. So every goal has targets to it. So this way, it isn't just, you know, a lofty ideal. It's an actual mission. What can we do in order to make the world a better place? Unfortunately, in 2020, 25 percent of the global population lacked safe drinking water in their home. In 2020, 25 percent of people on this planet lacked drinking water readily available. We have billionaires in just about every country, and we do not have everybody with access to drinking water. With the pandemic in full swing, especially at the beginning, it was all about, you know, washing your hands. We had to teach people how to wash their hands for a reasonable amount of time. 30 percent of the world's population could not do that because they did not have soap and water. They weren't able to do things that we kind of take for granted. And on the sanitation side of things, roughly 50 percent of the global population lack safely managed sanitation. There are places where open defecation is still a problem. There are places where it's a full ghetto community, and there's a strip of what's basically a really run-down porta potty that nobody maintains, that is unsafe for girls and for women at night, and people stop using it. So if we aren't able to have safe sanitation, we aren't able to have safe drinking water, this is a human health crisis, an environmental health crisis, and a just world safety and environmental crisis. So each of the targets has a specific endpoint in mind. This way it's not just that idea of, oh, water and sanitation. It's like, no, let's break it down. Further, once we get beyond those targets, we can start to see that SDG-6, pardon the pun, flows through just about every other sustainable development goal that the UN came up with. It does not, again, exist in that vacuum. So having clean water and sanitation is definitely going to impact SDG-3, good health and well-being. Climate action is going to impact SDG-6. The idea of having clean water, clean land, that what happens, what runs off from these treatment utilities, and unfortunately when there are no treatment utilities, directly impact both SDG-14 and SDG-15. I mentioned earlier that the porta-potties in a lot of these developing urban ghettos are primarily dangerous for women. If we're able to get that level of sanitation higher and that quality of sanitation higher, we will reduce the inequality of women versus men's safety. Women primarily are the ones who, when it comes to fresh water, need to start their day going out and going to the neighborhood well to fetch water for the day. Well, if women and girls are doing that, then they're not able to be in school. They're not able to be at work. They're busy taking care of that basic need because it's not in their home. It's miles away and they need to go fetch it every single day. If we're able to reduce the inequality with that and bring water to their home, then we're increasing that possibility of quality education, SDG-4. All of them kind of intertwine. Water is life, literally. Humans are not able to survive under conditions of either too little water or too much water. It's the Goldilocks. We need to have just enough and then same thing for sanitation. If we don't have any sanitation at all, we'll be experiencing cholera epidemics. Imagine what would have happened if on top of COVID hitting all of these places, we also had a cholera epidemic hitting all these places because of the breakdown in sanitation. It's really important that we understand where the idea of water treatment really fits into everything. The idea of using blockchain and new technologies and looking at viewing water and sanitation through a different lens all boils down to smart water. Now, what do I mean by smart water? Not this. Smart water is basically looking at not only the treatment itself, but implementing digital solutions to enable those treatment utilities to improve infrastructure performance and move towards being triple bottom line sustainable. Good for the environment, good for the economy, and good for society. Kind of like any really beneficial supply chain management strategy. You want to be able to hit those marks. You want to be able to have it triple bottom line sustainable. We utility strive to do the best job we can every day because it's human and environmental health impacts if we don't, but we need to make sure to get that information. We need to make sure to make the best use of all of our digital resources. To me, smart water implies bringing together the people, the process, and that technology in order to optimize the treatment. And this is how blockchain and smart contracts fit into the industry. We are, as an industry, we're kind of in the stone age relative to supply chain management, relative to logistics, relative to even the oil and gas industry. Water and especially sanitation are kind of afterthoughts. We're out of sight, out of mind, but we're just starting to experiment with this new technology. It's just starting to come on board for us. And how do we do that? We are looking at industrial Internet of Things, which not every facility has the infrastructure for that the physical hardware for places are moving towards that. That's something that, again, we're behind the eight ball. We're getting there. Once we have that IOT infrastructure, we can start collecting big data sets. We can start deploying AI and machine learning. We can start looking at predictive analytics. Digital twins is something that I'm going to cover in a little bit that is really, really cool. My company is actually in order to implement our blockchain technology, we are utilizing digital twins as kind of like a sandbox, a safe space to be able to toy around with things because a utility runs 24-7, 365. If there is a hardware or a software breakdown somewhere in there, that's inexcusable. So a startup company like me can't go in and be like, hey, I'm going to screw around on your lab bench for a little bit. On the lab bench, I can mess around and if something doesn't work, I can wipe it clean and start just start over. Within an actual utility, we don't have that capability. It's something that we really need to make sure that we have that sandbox to trial things, to demo things before messing around with the utility in situ or in that physical space that they take place in. And for me, data is only as good as the platform that it's housed on. So that's kind of where we're at a stopping point in the industry. We're still using, again, Stone Age technology. Unfortunately, we can't have a conversation about all the fun stuff without also discussing cybersecurity concerns. It's something that we've, as an industry, kind of been forced into. We weren't quite ready for it until February of last year where all of a sudden there was a hack on a water utility and we're like, wow, okay, we didn't think we were on anybody's radar. So we're learning. We're on a very steep learning curve, but we are learning. Just to get everybody on the same page for some phrasing that I'm going to be throwing out there, everybody on here pretty much knows what IT is, information technology, all of the hardware stuff. I'm going to also be focusing on OT or operational technology. That's the stuff that is physically at the facility that's controlling the process. So I mentioned, you know, looking at physical and chemical treatment. Well, that chemical dosing of the water needs to come from a physical change in the valves of a chemical storage tank. Well, that is traditionally done by someone going out there and manually turning a valve. Well, now as utilities are trying to get smarter, that's something that we're able to really toy around with and use software and hardware in concert to be able to adjust that for us. This way we don't have to have somebody out there. We're able to digitize that. Most utilities have digital OT at some level. SCADA, which is supervisory control and data acquisition software, is kind of the general repository for all of the data collected by the IOT devices. And PLCs or programmable logic controllers are the devices, the edge devices. They're the ones that are physically controlling that valve. You know, once they get triggered, that valve then opens. Unfortunately, in our industry, because smart stuff is still new to us, you know, we're all about preventative maintenance for IT. You know, we get updates from all of our software providers and all of our IT departments and everything. Oh, make sure you're watching out for this hack and that spam and everything else. But unfortunately, the OT is usually subject to just reactive maintenance. We don't really do anything until, oh, wow, we tried sending a signal for this to happen at this location in the plant and nothing happened. We don't know what to do. With the really cool IOT stuff, we're able to have additional capabilities that we never were before. We're able to have on the water side of things something like advanced metering infrastructure or AMI. Basically, that's able to, instead of having somebody go to your house, physically read a dial on the side of your house to know what your water bill would equate to, they're able to just kind of pass by, scan a little tag as they're driving past your house, and that information will be automatically uploaded back at their home base. We're able to do that through GIS. We're able to, on the wastewater side of things, look at the collection system. You know, I mentioned earlier that wastewater treatment utilities get a whole lot of stuff from various places. We have residential neighborhoods that just discharge just regular waste, you know, whatever gets flushed down a toilet, whatever gets swirled down the dishwasher drain or the shower drain. All of that stuff comes to a utility like this. But in addition, we also have hospital waste that comes to us. So we have medical waste. You know, when COVID first hit, we had hospitals calling us asking what to do with the material that the COVID patients were excreting. And we're like, we don't know. You guys are the hospital. You tell us. And there was this disconnect. There's also industrial facilities. So chemical processing plants, garment processing, manufacturing facilities, stuff like that. All of those things that use water either to create some sort of liquid mixture or to cool things down, you know, nuclear facilities. Cooling down, you know, spent nuclear fuel rods. All of that stuff produces wastewater. And it comes to us. And all of those microbes that I said are the real stars of wastewater treatment rely on the quality of that incoming flow. So we're starting to be able to put out IOT sensors to be able to get an idea of what that quality is. This way, what happened to my facility when I was coming back from Unleash doesn't happen again. You know, we're able to get that kind of advance warning like, hey, really gnarly stuff is coming down, brace for impact and try and come up with a plan on what to do to recover. We're also able to deploy it in not only the treatment facility itself, but even just in the engineering and design space. I was talking about those digital twins, you know, a 3D rendering of your physical facility. Well, that wouldn't be possible without industrial Internet of Things in the laboratory. I'm able to automate some of the stuff here thanks to new cool tech. So we're starting to be able to implement a lot of this stuff. There we go. We are unfortunately, though, drowning in data. And yet at the same time, it's everywhere and we can't use it. So everybody's heard the phrase, water, water, everywhere, nor a drop to drink. That's kind of where the water and wastewater industry is now. We have all this data coming in from all of those sources that I just recognized, but we don't know what to do with it. It's raw data. It's giant data sets that we're looking like, okay, this is great, but what does it mean? IOT devices generate a sea of data, but it's the information that we really need. It's currently not being used to its maximum potential because going from a lot of data to usable information requires a middle step. And we haven't quite perfected that middle step yet. We need context. We need processing. All right. So the start of that context and processing is in data mining, finding patterns, employing statistics, AI, machine learning, deep learning is where things get a little scary, but that's kind of where the technology is leading us. But it's all about finding patterns and correlations within those large data sets being generated. So right now, as a whole, the industry is still getting comfortable with AI in general. You start talking about machine learning or even deep learning and people's eyes not only glaze over, but they physically tense up. You can see everybody start to clench when you start talking about utilizing machine learning for stuff. Now, with artificial intelligence, it's giving us the capability for a computer system to perform tasks. Let's be honest. If Push came to serve, a trained monkey could do my job in the laboratory. A well-trained one, mind you, but still a trained monkey. And trying to digitize that, trying to digitize that manual valve opening and closing is something that we're moving to as an industry because in order to make something truly triple bottom line sustainable, we can't be subject to shutdowns. We can't be subject to cybersecurity attacks. We can't be subject to what happened down in Texas last year where they experienced a cold snap. So all of their water pipes froze. They didn't plan on anything ever getting that cold. All of a sudden, there were thousands of people in Texas who had zero access to clean water. So we can't be in that situation anymore. As we move towards sustainable cities, as we move towards truly sustainable development for everybody, that's no longer going to be an option. So we need to start looking at AI. We need to start looking at machine learning. We need to eventually start looking at deep learning no matter how scary it is. And the only way we can do that is if we implement it correctly, if we implement it safely. Again, this is human health and environmental health. We cannot afford to be just willy-nilly throwing it around and saying, hey, let's see what happens. It has to be done smartly. Because otherwise, as I'm sure looms large over all aspects of the tech industry, if it's not done smartly, we could run the risk of ending up in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. It's one of those things where we need to bring in, again, people, process, and the technology. We can't just create technology and then jam it down utilities' throats. This needs to be created organically. This needs to be something where all of the relevant stakeholders have a voice and saying, yeah, we want to do this, but we want to make sure not to do this poorly. We want to make sure that it includes all of these factors that maybe haven't been thought of yet. It's really crucial in something like supply chain management and even trade finance for a little bit. You can remove the human element to a certain extent and still pretty much be okay. There's still going to be the need for some individuals for some human involvement, but on the whole, you can automate things from beginning to end and it fully streamlines everything. It fully digitizes everything. Water and wastewater in particular, it's a little bit more of a finesse. That's why I said people, process, and technology. It needs to be something that includes all of the factors because there are so many moving parts and there are so many subtleties to water and wastewater treatment. How do we try and get around some of those subtleties? How do we try to make sure that all of that toe dipping and in trying to really experiment with this new technology doesn't blow up in our faces? Well, we're starting small. Utilizing machine learning and utility specific data sets to do some predictive analytics to be like, okay, well, it's a giant if then statement for modeling. If we do this, then we think this will happen. Well, let's find out. Engineers and mathematicians love their models, but models are only as good as the information used to come up with that model equation and to come up with that idea to begin with. Garbage in, garbage out is the standard phrase for any environmental engineer learning to try and go into something like this. But for us, it's another decision-making tool. It's something where we can start to work with that data. It can give us that information. I mentioned digital tools before. This is what it represents. The gray, boring looking thing is the physical facility. Again, this is something that while it's new in water and wastewater, because we're behind that APOL, it's very much so deployed in manufacturing. It's very much so deployed in the gas electric space. Nuclear facilities like digital twins have been around for a little while. But for us, it's like, oh, shiny. But we're starting to get an understanding of what we can do. I think it's absolutely super cool. I can't wait to dig into this more as it becomes more mainstream and more well-known. It's a 3D digital sandbox to play around with what if scenarios. Because, again, utilities do not want to be taken offline for any reason. If there's any sort of problem, they want to screw around with stuff in the background. This way, if that eventuality would ever happen, they already have a plan decided on what to do to respond to that. A lot of it is corresponding around climate resiliency, so SDG 13. It's one of those things where, again, it's a tool to be able to get smart cities and smart communities and smart utilities up to those sustainable development goals. I mentioned that the data is only as good as the platform that it lives on. We can all appreciate that being from a blockchain background. That's what it's all about. It's data management. We're not in a data creation space. We're in a data management space. For us in the water industry, it needs to be accessible. We found that out during COVID when a lot of upper-level managers were sent home because they weren't needed at these facilities. But we still need to run these facilities 24, 7, 365. I have been coming into work every day since COVID happened. There was no stop. We can't do this from home as much fun as it would be to have a laboratory in my basement. It's one of those things where we needed to have the information accessible to upper-level management who were working remotely and some still are. It needs to be integrable, which I've never wondered or I've always wondered how the proper phrasing of it. Apologies if that came out wrong. Basically, something that is easily integrated with the existing technology. A lot of utilities, especially here in the United States, didn't pop up until the 60s and the 70s back when the Clean Water Act first came around. There was a whole mess of utilities that were suddenly in existence. There was this boom in water and sanitation treatment. All of these utilities popped up and they didn't have smart water in mind for 60 years down the line. So all of the smart tech that we're starting to employ needs to be able to be easily integrated with the existing and let's be honest, really old physical infrastructure that a lot of utilities are still working with. Water and wastewater operators are a very visual breed. We need to kind of, as people are making their rounds around the facility, just kind of go glancing at a computer screen that we're walking past and keep on going with our rounds. We have a lot of space to cover during our shift and we need to make sure that everything is running the way it should be. We need red light bad, green light good. We need that easy interface and that very visual data understanding. I'm kind of ashamed to say this, especially for this crowd, but most utilities here still use on-site server rooms. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's something that that's how we've done it. That's how the idea of, well, where do we house the data? Right here. We'll put it over in that corner. We'll lock everything up and it'll be as secure as possible and that's kind of how things have been. That's the status quo. And to COVID, we need remote access. We need a way to back up that information just in case something were to happen. Some place does lose power. As we start to morph and slowly bring people on board to utilizing things like cloud computing, that's when we can really start to utilize the additional tech. We're able to really start to go to having that remote access and what part of what my company is working on the Holy Grail, not only remote access to looking at the data, but being able to use a revised version of SCADA that's housed on a distributed ledger technology platform interacting with those PLCs at the utility to be able to control that utility while keeping cybersecurity in mind. So unfortunately, I mentioned on-site servers. This is also the kind of standard proprietary dashboard that most sensor vendors within the water and wastewater industry will sell you. If you buy their sensor, you also have to sign up for their proprietary information dashboard, which I absolutely hate proprietary dashboards, but it's the current industry standard because this is that visual, easy graphic representation and we can see trend analysis. We can see green and red. We can see all of this information that these sensors are collecting on a screen. What I propose doing is being able to change from a proprietary dashboard that basically only the utility and the sensor vendor company can see the information on and altering that to a distributed ledger. That's where blockchain and smart contracts come in. That will give us that data accessibility, transparency and immutability that we need, that will also allow utilities to maintain the ownership of their data, which is very big in the utility space. Nobody wants to put that information out there and then all of a sudden whatever vendor company they're giving that information to can go sell that information to another company or can sell that information to a journalist or it's very, very not only cybersecurity oriented but also data ownership oriented and data privacy oriented. That's one of the things that really struck me about hyper ledger and hyper ledger fabric in general is that ability to have this permissioned multi-channel capability within the blockchain so that every utility can only see their individual data. The more utilities that are brought on board increases the overall cybersecurity of the platform but you're not having a utility out there where another utility can see their information that maybe they don't really want the other utility to see and then incorporating smart contracts on top of that. Again, one of the things I really like about hyper ledger fabric is that capability and the actual consensus mechanism and the smart contract language that they're able to deploy. With all of this really cool technology there's still a lot of barriers unfortunately. Again, we as an industry move at half the speed of smell. We're very slow to change but human health and environmental health so there's a reason behind it but there's people like me that are out there like yes we need to start looking outside the box. We need to start looking at other sectors, other industries and maybe kind of borrowing some of their technology to be able to improve our own industry. Cost, expertise, the understanding and reliability of the technology. Sensors, I'm sure in supply chain management every once in a while you'll get a sensor picking up a number and you're like huh is that really correct or is that just you know that sensor now needs to be calibrated? Well those same conversations are happening at utilities. Is that sensor really reading that number or does it just need a recalibration? I also mentioned before the idea of now that's how we've always done it. Well things here are fine. Unfortunately things are no longer fine so utilities are kind of being forced into this new venture because of the security risk and to the data access and also what to do with that data access once a malicious attacker starts using that in-road to start remotely controlling the OT for their ends and that's kind of again where the cybersecurity and the blockchain technologies really go well together in that we're able to utilize blockchain and smart contracts inherent you know 51% attack and and being able to to have smart contracts remotely control and remotely trigger those PLCs to do the work for us that will reduce the cybersecurity risk of a nefarious agent coming in and screwing around with our SCADA programming which unfortunately is exactly what happens down in Florida in in February of 2021. This is where the water industry was like oh shit pardon my language we did not realize we were on anybody's radar as an industry we were like oh yeah nuclear facilities they need to be worried about that oil and gas facilities they need to worry about that manufacturing chemical processing we're like who's going to screw around with a water and wastewater treatment plant until they did so we are very much so trying to create a new culture of cybersecurity awareness so what happened in February was that a known person got in through a remote access software because it was during the pandemic people were working from home so all of those upper level managers were using team viewer you know desktop sharing to be able to get into their their facility programming well unfortunately there was a malicious attacker who was also using that same team viewer to be able to get into the facility programming this was deemed possible because all the computers that the personnel at the facility were using were connected to that SCADA programming that that central repository of the the iot data all of the computers were connected to the internet without firewall protection and all of the computers shared the same password this is the level of cybersecurity awareness that wait water and wastewater utilities were at up until february of 2021 remember i said stone age same password no firewall protection yeah let's have everybody have access to everything not the greatest idea because people are the weakest link in the cyber security chain we know this the the benefits of utilizing that blockchain data management platform connected to a a smart contract digital communication strategy instead of just on-site server connected to a SCADA that somebody has to use team viewer to access is only one of the the benefits to bringing in blockchain smart contracts there's a company out there called civic ledger they're they're out of australia the the founder and ceo's name is katrina donagy she's absolutely amazing and she is utilizing blockchain to track water rights so again going back to sustainable development if you're planning on building something out you know building out a community well you need to make sure you have enough water flow to be able to support that community we have enough water scarcity as it is we don't need to add any more so if we add additional population well who who owns the water that used to be sent to this area that is now being sent to this area and this area who has that water rights and in in both developing nations around the world as well as even here in the united states water rights are a huge thing and there's a lot of documentation there's a lot of uncertainty there's a lot of mistrust so civic ledger is using blockchain to be able to track those water rights i believe that it can also be used in things like tracking leak detection tracking led service lines what my company is doing for it is utilizing it for a contaminant tracking i mentioned those industrial users sending us stuff and completely wiping out our microbes we can put this information on a distributed ledger remote utility control i mentioned that that idea of communicating directly with the plcs through smart contracts so what happened briefly because i know i've been yammering on for a while what happened when my utility was was totally knocked offline when i came back from unleash is that we had gotten a toxic slug from an industrial user we had no warning so we had guys out there popping manhole covers and backtracking through the entire collection system by the time we got to where we think the discharge was coming from it stopped conveniently and unfortunately you know when we went knocking on the the door of the industrial user it's like hey so you guys sent us some pretty gnarly stuff they're like no no we didn't and even if we did there's nothing you can do about it it sucked but they weren't wrong because there was no single point of truth to what we were saying versus what they were saying so my idea that you know again rolling things around in my head just coming back from unleash was to create that single point of truth by utilizing i iot having the information stored you know on the cloud having it in a blockchain this way the industrial user had access to that information the utility had access to that information the reg the environmental regulating authority had access to the information any any deemed stakeholder could have access to that information at the same time we could deploy smart contracts to be able to faster and more efficiently get those responses from the utility from what they needed to do we could use it for billing purposes where we had automatic financial transactions occurring instead of just waiting months and months for the data to be turned into billing forms and then have the bill sent to the industrial user only for them to say no we're not paying that because we don't believe it was us who sent that additional discharge so if we get all the information out there we digitize the information coming in we can digitize the information going out and start to really streamline utility responses to make it so that we're not discharging untreated sewage to the the open water you know we discharge to a river we don't want to pollute that river because that river is somebody else's drinking source we want to make sure that that information and and that physical treatment happens because environmental sustainability human social sustainability we don't want this surrounding community to be angry with us they use that water and also financial sustainability we want to make sure that we're not spending extra money on treatment chemicals we want to make sure we're not spending extra on regulatory fines what we're also looking at is they said that remote utility control right now there's that lovely picture of a valve that everybody out of wastewater and water utility has been like yep that's a valve that's a number write that down on the little sheet and then they go on with their day in order to bypass all of that we have the capability and this is something that i'm currently still waiting to hear back from the national science foundation as to whether they think it's a good idea that they will fund the r&d to create this is creating that blockchain-based SCADA platform so that we're distributing the information and we're utilizing smart contracts to communicate with the plcs and we're utilizing and taking advantage of the cyber security benefits that that would inherently guarantee us so that we don't end up shooting ourselves in the foot if a nefarious actor were to come around or in case of another global pandemic we lose half of our workforce so now that i've kind of made everybody's brains explode the last thing i want to leave you with is what has become almost my personal mantra since really getting sucked down this this tech and blockchain rabbit hole the most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done it this way let's not always do it this way and that's me awesome jennifer that was inspiring this bitch i love it thank you hopefully i did for everybody i'm not a award freak as for your definition but definitely i do love topics that you touched being so much interesting what's going on in specific areas such as africa so it was an inspiring one for me i'll loot into the tenants to make questions to you though we have very little time left i didn't hear anybody pipe up during specific slides so hopefully i didn't miss anybody i know it was a lot of information in a very short amount of time andria there's a couple of comments in the chat about getting the recordings maybe we want to remind folks that yes we will send out the recording to the event or we'll post that on the on the wiki site correct it's on the wiki site and also on the linkin inside so it's going to be posted tomorrow's latest the day after tomorrow but in a very few days you're going to have it on our linkin inside so i'll make it available for anybody but join amazing to to access it and to enjoy it awesome and we'll be able to reach out to you jennifer uh for any questions i'm guessing yeah definitely um feel free to shoot me an email connect with me on linkedin um or just you know for anybody out there um you know both andrea and and eric have my email information so they can pass something along um they i i try not to harass them too much but uh if if there's anything that you guys have a question about by all means go for it i actually do have a question jennifer it's a very important question as well um you you'd reference two different sci-fi movies in your uh in your discussion today one is skynet and the other one is star wars i would have to ask you which one you are partial to because that will define our future relationship ah well i'm gonna throw a wrench in that thank you for giving the right answer jennifer you know what i think it's not like that beat man over there from canada take care seriously jennifer i'm just saying pick wisely so how about this for a response i am of the mindset of Jurassic Park when um when the the scientist says it's not we can we can or we could we could we could we were so busy focusing on what we could do that we didn't stop to consider what we should do so it's very political and important so thank you very much but but it's true because it factors into the the the terminator thing where if we don't look at what we should do we'll end up just letting technology run away with itself and it needs to be that people process and technology in terms of life lessons i'm gonna go star wars i'm a fan of the star wars galaxy sorry good good good oh my god i didn't even notice that that's awesome i'm not in wrong answer definitely wrong answer this is so you prefer the rise of the machines yeah definitely so i love arnie she i'm a big fan you're talking to a guy that was born at the beginning of the 70s so you cannot tell me that you go for the beat man from canada i'm disappointed but seriously Jennifer that was a great pitch i loved it literally so i can only thank you for being with us let's keep the conversation on going sorry for the noises in the background but my kids are at home at this time of the day and they are noisy as you can imagine so once again the recording will be made available shortly after the call we see tomorrow maybe and i'll make it available for anybody who's joined us i'll go post it on our linked inside the slides that you saw today Jennifer thanks again it was really great speech and let's keep the conversation on going and we're going to to join forces again in two weeks time i hope to see you all thanks everybody bye everyone bye