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10.5446/20622 (DOI)
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Welcome back to stage two. We leave the door open so that the people can come in. For the next hour we like to go with you to China to hear what's going on over there in the world of technology, how the technology drives the life over there. And we like to listen to hear it from the people from Geek Park, one of the most prominent technology media in China. So please give a warm welcome. I cannot. This one is working. Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming here and to learn about something really new about China. My name is Qing Liwen and I came to settle down in Berlin three and a half years ago and really, really fall in love with this city. And so I started my own consultancy firm to help to facilitate exchange between the innovation power between China and Germany. And I was lucky enough to find a Chinese partner, which is Geek Park, the biggest innovators community in China. And last year, the founder, Zhang Peng, was here and gave a brilliant talk introducing China's geek culture. This year, he kept his promise last year and brought, bring back a delegation of Chinese innovators. And now Zhang Peng will get on stage and give you a brief introduction of what Geek Park is and what does it do and why it can show you the best angle to observe the innovation power in China. Thank you. Well, thank you guys. It's my great pleasure to come back here. And last year, I have a speech in Republic talking about, talked about how geek culture make impact to Chinese society and economy. And I made a promise. I made a promise that we, I will brought some of my friends, those geeks come back here and to prove what I'm talking about is true. And I think I need to thank Li Wen and the organizer of Republic to give me the opportunity to fulfill my promise. And today, I brought four of my friends and all of them are very talented, talented entrepreneurs in China. And they all try to build an innovative product and to use the part enabled by the power of technology. And also, I think they have a strong dream to build beautiful things. So, because in China, there are a lot of changes is happening. Like we, we are building some product, not just cheap, and we are building some product with high quality. And the society really accept that those high quality product and they want to pay for that. And I think that's today, China is no longer just a mysterious oriental country far, far away. It's already a part of the world. So, it's better we start to talk to each other and try to understand each other and try to find a way maybe to collaborate with each other to create something more valuable, not just for China or Europe, maybe to the world. So, today, maybe we can make today a good start, starting point. And Geek Park, in the past six years, we try to help Chinese innovators to grow more efficiently and help them to have the global vision and to help them to be more certain their way to build innovative product and high quality product. And I think in the future, those innovators in China, they can make impact not just to Chinese society, they can make impact to the world. And today, I'm very happy to have the opportunity to bring some of them come here and share their story. And I think without any further delay, and I will give back the stage to Li Wen and I hope everyone will enjoy the next hour. And I believe you will all get something fresh, get some beautiful story to share to your friends. Okay. Thank you. Okay, we start with the environment. We all know that they are in China nowadays, how unbearable it is. And we all know that it needs a solution. Lots of young people have participated in solving the problem. One of them is Zhang Xiangdong, the founder of 700Bike, who quit his former job of a big internet company and started his cool bike business. So now you can see what it is like. And I hand it over to him. Oh, so he will talk in Chinese, so you will have to put on the headset that is on your... Can you find it? No? Okay. Oh, okay. Actually, he doesn't have a headset. Okay. Okay. I will just hand it over to Xiangdong. Okay. Okay. Hello, everyone. Sorry I'm a lot of good at English. So you need a translator. Yeah. Now, let me give you a brief introduction of myself. I have read a book from Germany and this book illustrates the history of the small figures and also it expressed the changes to the whole world. I want to illustrate my one slide. I have read a German book by Graz called My Century. And I also want to use my PBT, just like he did, to tell the story from the perspective of small figures in the society about what happened in the past century. If you have been to Shanxi, the Shanxi province in China, you should see... And in 1977, I was born in Shanxi. And that time, China is an agricultural country. There is no TV set. There is no... So look at this face. Do you think he looked like Tarak Hota? Because he comes from that province. And he was born in 1977. And at that time, China had no telephone, no mobile and nothing electric, actually. Electricity was even a problem. In 1999, I graduated from the Beijing University. At that time, the information network started to arise in China and the netism registered one million in China. And at that time, China just started its internet connection with the world. So there were about one million internet users in China. In 2004, very unfortunately, my last company suffered a failure. In 2004, I have started another company, which is called Sange Mobile. And the penetration rate of internet is only 6.2 percent. And in 2013, my second company has listed in the United States. And at that time, China's internet has reached the penetration rate and has cashed up the development of the international level. And now, a lot of people are using this mobile phone to get access to the internet. And in 2014, I have started my third company, which is the – our definition is we want to be a new generation of urban park. And I am over 30. In the past 30 years, we have witnessed the contracted history of everything that has happened in Europe during the past 300 years. And China's development has developed from a demographic dividend into a polarization. And we may notice that the internet is very popularized. And for example, if you order something online, then tomorrow you will get it. China has undergone great changes in the classes. For example, the middle class and the people got their own hobbies and own options for trademarks. And there are still a lot of changes in the market in China. We may notice that people started to, for example, in the past, people want something, want to buy something, but now people pursue more the quality of the products. So this is the upgrade of consumption. And the business starting has always undergone a lot of changes. In the past 10 years, the entrepreneurs of generations for generation have undergone a lot of very remarkable changes over the past years. For example, taking myself as myself, as I started my second – my first and my second company, what I pursue is the wealth. I want to get rid of the poverty. But for this time I started my business again because I wanted to pursue what I love. So I started to travel to different kind of countries. And for example, the France and the South America, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina. And I love bicycles. I love riding bicycles. There are over 100 books of the bicycles. For example, my soccer – my socks – it's also printed with a bicycle. So for this time I'm not for money, but for my love, for my passion. I have published a book in Simply Fight Chinese and also the traditional Chinese. I really love it because I decided to do something for it. China's entrepreneurs have undergone a lot of changes in its mentality and also the behavior of these companies. We are not making copycats. We are focusing on the innovation. And 90 percent of the components are from our own wisdom. So now you are seeing the bicycles from China and all the things cannot found in Europe. And this is a very special screen which displays, for example, the speed and also the miles. And it is very, very beautiful. What is important is the chips in it. You can ensure that your bicycle will never be lost. And last year we have launched this bicycle. And we have – seven bicycles get lost, but later we found back all of the bicycles lost and we have catch the thief. So do you think that we should come to Germany? This is only the chips of the bicycles. The entire bicycle, the most flexible one is this part. And this is very, very special. We are designed and we are made by 3D technology. And in history it is unprecedented one because it is the most simplest one to fold together. So we are not just producing such folded or foldable bikes. And we are producing another products, for example, the H-style. And it can reduce the uncomfortableness by probably the turbulence. And it is really very beautiful. And this is only one small part of our innovation. To now we have issued five types of bicycles. We have more than 20 patents. And there are three or four of them belongs to the innovation of the global level. And China – China is very oft – maybe it's understood, but now the world has been changed. And in China our bicycles are produced with the European standard. For example, this bicycle is 20 percent higher than the European standards. So today's products is not only the made in China but also the quality in China. It is higher in the – quality is higher than the European. Apart from this one and look at the screen. This is our first product, which is called Backstreet. Apart from that we have our elegant bowler and flora. And it is exclusively designed for the gentlemen and ladies. And this one was launched by Brazil in March, a Galaxy Pro. And it has been rewarded by Germany side. So we are – we're not just wanting to make a city bicycle but also we are going to create a lifestyle brand. Today we come here not only to introduce my products and also not only to describe to you an idea of starting business. I would like to introduce my philosophy of bicycles and the culture of bicycles in China was regarded as a big city of bicycle. And now 70 percent of the bicycles were produced in China. And there is a zone – say, 9 million bicycles in Beijing. And this is an old feeling. But in the past several years we noticed that the majority of Chinese have cars and there are a lot of traffic congestions. And they have given up the writing of bicycles. And in Berlin I noticed that there are a lot of people writing bicycles but there's still a lot of improvement. We hope that we can work together to create a culture of writing bicycles because bicycles are a symbol of a perfect life of human beings. And everybody wishes that the life will be more happier, more free, and more – with more freedom. And this is the content of the writing bicycle. And for example, if the bicycles are not – that easily be stolen, they will be – you will feel a great sense of safety. And you're writing a bicycle, you can feel the same feeling of writing a band because it is a very pleasant thing. And the environment will be better and our life quality will get higher. And this is a product of philosophy. So in the introduction of our bicycles, it is not for money. We just hope that our life will be better, our quality will be better. And this is not idea of the bicycle companies but this is the idea shared by everybody. This is the goal that why we are here in Germany. And a lot of bicycles – and I personally have 16 bicycles – the best one in every category is possessed by me. So I'm just trying to experience all these things, to connect everything together, and to experience all kinds of categories of bicycles. And we are – the goal is not to popularize the bicycle writing in China but also we want to enable more people to have the opportunity to ride a bicycle. So now our goal is that our products can go global. For example, to come back to the hometown of bicycles that is Europe. I know that in Germany there are a lot of high quality products. For example, helmets and clothes in China. And I also hope that I can be a bridge. Thank you very much to the know of you. Thank you so much. Talking about childhood, I had quite an unhappy one because my father used to lock me up every weekend on the balcony so that I can recite 300-ton dynasty poems. And then the younger generation in China nowadays, they are even worse because they have spent longer hours on homework and then after homework, if they have some time, they play computer games. So to solve this issue, there is a big, big company, L.E. Sports. They are now a new company but they try their best to provide interesting content, to attract Chinese, to participate more in the sports in their daily lives. So now we have Shan Feng, the director of the industrial design of L.E. Sports, to tell you how. Good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, here it is. It's really a great honor for me to stand here and give a speech and talk about my company, L.E. Sports, and why it is more than the Chinese ESPN. Okay, so who we are. First, I'd like to show some pictures from cars and televisions and TV series, mobile phones and bicycles, VR devices, and sports cameras and even stadiums. All these products, including, belong to so many different categories, they all come from one company called L.E.Co. And that's the parent company of my company. And L.E.Co is a group made up of many different branch companies, ranging from sports, music, and TV, and cars, and mobile phones, and cloud surveys, and financial or even online stores or something. And my company, L.E. Sports, is a very important role in the family. Yeah. So I'm going to show you some simple facts and numbers to help you understand what my company looks like. So L.E. Sports is a leading internet company in the sports industry in China, who started its business in 2014. And after about one year, it raised more than $123 million for the series A founding, which totally broke the record in China. And that's not the end of the story, because just this year, I mean, last month, April 2016, we announced a $1.2 billion series B founding, which totally made a new record. It was more important that we have more than 300 major sporting events worldwide to copyright, and nearly more than 70% of them are exclusive. So we have more than 14 million visitors per day, and that's about 3% of China's online video users. And all these things have helped us make our valuation goes up to $3.3 billion, and that's about $21.5 billion RMB. Yeah. And our business comprises four key elements, including games copyright, intelligence business, and the internet app and the content platform. Okay, so to be more specific, I'd like to put some details about my company's business. So basically, the sports provides some sports events, online videos, and that is why we're always compared with ESPN. And we're happy to hear that because ESPN is a great company, and we can want to be a great company in the future. But to be honest, we are actually doing more things than the ESPN. We're trying to do more things. So I think every one of you must know that the copyright has always been an issue in China in the past couple of years, but things are getting better and better now thanks to companies like us. My parent company, the ECO, has been an evaluation list of copyright protecting everything the company started. We have paid a great amount of money in buying copyrights, and meanwhile, we really made great efforts in protecting them. So is the sports. However, however, we don't want to enter some situation of an endless copyright battle with other companies, our aim actually is to make the most value of the copyrights because we want to provide a better service, we want to provide a better experience for our users because the philosophy of my company is to make everybody get involved in sports better and easily. And I think we are in a great era, the internet era. So internet has the ability to reorganize other resources and have everybody connected with each other and also have everyone connected to the world. And of course, we want to have everyone connected to sports. And these are some events we organized besides those copyright things. So that's a beautiful dream to have everyone connected to sports, but how do we make it? And this is a fundamental business structure of my company. It's kind of like some combinations, kind of like some, you know, some method or some notion or something because we want to supply the platform, product, app and the content, we want to connect these four parts and use them to provide a better service for all of users. For example, if you pay to be a member, you can enjoy the game videos across all screens, including the big screen TV for information that we have already had a 120 inches big screen TV. It's already sold in China. And you can see it on your mobile phones and tablet or use a VR or mobile phone. And we have just released a car, an electronic car. You can see the games on your car also. That's what we want to provide you with our device, with the hardware devices. And these are some games we organized by ourselves. Like we want to implement some hardware of our own to provide a better service to provide some unique content like this G1. You see all the famous athletes aware our sports camera on the head. Then the users can see from their point of view, from their view angle to see what your idol, what the favorite athletes see, you know, just to have their experience. And it's really exciting. And so the same with the running thing. You can see the guys are wearing the cameras on them. So what's more? We want to promote the notion that we want to have our users know better of the value of our content. That's why we lower the price of our hardware. We want to make them know that the intellectual property of our content is very valuable. That's why we lower the price of hardware and we want to make them pay for the membership, pay for the content. So with the membership service, we want to make the user feel respected. I want to make some personal customized service. We want to make the whole sports seem more interesting. And then we will have them get more involved in sports. So we have just talked about some hardware devices because I am in charge of the industry design department. And I know the aim of our hardware products because we want to provide some better service with them. So I'd like to talk about what we make. We also made a bicycle. Yeah, just kind of like Mr. Jiang's work. But it's kind of different. Because we want to make the product connected to the internet, connected to our content services. So we would like to say that it's more like a writing, a quality of writing system. So we have integrated some electronic parts in it. Like we have a head screen. We have some hand buttons. We have a bike operating system. Yeah, and even some other very cool functions like some automatic lock. You can use it to control the central panel or use your phone. Yeah, that's just a function. But the key points here is we want to use these functions to connect all the writers. We want to make a bicycle that is connected to the internet that make every writer connected with each other. And we want to have them connected to the cloud service. That's for the writers. And besides, we want to have all of our products connected with each other. Like you can transfer some data, transfer some information with the other products of our own. And even with the cloud service. Yes. I don't want to talk too much about the bicycle because in the future, we are going to have even more products like the road bicycle, mountain bicycle, photo bicycle or some sports cameras. And we have UAV like drones. And we have some variables like shoes and clothes. And we even we are developing some GM equipment like some treadmill or something. Yeah, because we think hardwares are some sorry, hardwares is something we want to supply some more accesses for users to get to the sports to make them have the better experience, have the enjoy the better service of ours. Yeah. I think, yeah, that's pretty much what I want to tell you about today. And anyway, I want to stress it again that our aim is to have everybody get involved with the sports better and more easily. And I think we are on the right way and we will finally achieve that goal. Thank you. That's it. The next speaker is the most special one in this delegation because he has the longest working experience among all these youngsters. For 50 years, he has been fascinated and devoted to audio smart audio technology. So his company's name is called as smart audio. And he has made radio the coolest thing of all again. So let's welcome Mr. Zheng Dujun, the founder and CEO of S-mart radio. Hello, everybody. So sorry I can't use Chinese. And today I want to talk about the story about radios. This year, I am 60. Talking about radios, all of you are familiar with the gadget. But for me, the radios is a companion for my growth. And 100 years ago, China is lagging behind in this regard, especially in Germany. For example, Germany is a great producer of radios. But for China, radios are imported, for example, from Japan, from the United States, from the Soviet Union, and also today's, we are Russia. But after the 1950s, China has a great producer, especially at the end of the 1960s. And the production volume is billions of radios which are produced in China and that is a huge amount of production volume. But we know that the best quality of made in China radio is what we now see, such type of radios. And this represents the highest level of production in China, but there is still imperfections because there is still a long way to catch up with the level in Germany. But for me, radios give me very important feelings. As I was born, the livelihood in China was really very difficult because I have the clothing and the food is a problem for me. For example, when I was a kid, in seven years old, this was my first time to see a radio. I think it is really miraculous. It is unbelievable. So later on, we get destined with the radio. Later, I made the radios for myself and from that year, it has been 50 years till now. So radios have become a very important keyword for my growth for so many years because it has changed my fate. Because of the radios, I have become an auto designer. The stereo that is designed by me has been awarded globally. And I have become the first owner of so many designs in this regard. Probably everyone here is very familiar with the products in Germany because they are of very high quality. But for us, this high quality product is unreachable for China. Thanks to the reform and opening up policy in China in the 1980s, we started to contact and get access to the products produced in Germany in the 1950s. So we have bought several hundred radios, different kind of radios from Germany to China. And we really experienced that the quality is really unbelievable. So finally, I have got a chance to make radios myself. And in 2004, I started my own work to make radios. So I hope that we can present the prosperity in Germany, the similar prosperity. And we insist doing this, insist on making a lot of high quality radios. And these radios can reach or even exceed the quality of the million Germany. But during the 10 years, the sales volume is very, very low. There are several hundred radios. But last year, everything has been changed. And through the crowdfunding, within one month, I have crowdfounded more than 2,000 radios. For example, let me calculate, it's about 600,000 US dollars. At the same time, our trademark has jumped into the first tier of the best seller, and it is equivalent to Bosch and other high-quality international brands. And we are the same group. At the same time, the products of us have entered the super – the fashionable super shops in China around the country. And last year, within six months, we have exceeded the sales volume equivalent to the sales volume in the past four years. So why should such miracle occur during the short six months? And why should this miracle happen in the market? And we have summarized several reasons. Compared to the previous years, China has undergone great changes, and through the economic development in these years, China has become a highly information-based society. And in this society, people are very reliable on the TV set, cell phones and notebooks and computers. And people's time is fragmented. And the life has been taken by the high-tax. And they pursue a way of living, a lifestyle, concentrating on the life quality. And our products have found this point and can provide – provide, for example, the companion and the human care to the customers. Thus, we provide a high quality of life. And also, our products can be made to the extremes, and everything is handmade through dozens of procedures. So our products are very praised online. For example, the good appraisal takes up more than 99 percent of all the judgments, customer judgments. So we are insist on making very good quality products and flagship products. And we insist on our own logic of products. For example, it should be good-looking, and it should be fun, and it should be good to use. And at the same time, in the way we should have culture elements, we should have some old feelings, and we should be classy. At the same time, we should be unique. We should be exclusive. And in the market, such kind of discipline are very rare. And on the worldwide, there is no producer who wants to do such old-fashioned radios. So we should focus more on the connections. And now I have such kind of radios. We can see that we have big radios, but we have also small ones. It is very cute, and we have a very high sound quality. Third, our Malkin radios has combined traditional products together with the Internet, and we have made a lot of innovations. For example, we have done the crowdfunding for the innovation of products. We connect very much together with the young generation, because the young generation does not have any experience, probably, with radios. But we should focus on the good products with good appearance and good functionality, so that the generation may love the radio. Just now, I have got the crowdfunding of these small products, and the crowdfunding has nearly reached $500,000. And in the market, we have conducted some innovation, and we have cooperated together with a lot of influential trademarks in China in terms of the crowdfunding. And in marketing, we have a lot of innovations through some new marketing model, module, and we can publicize our ideal and our products into the group of customers. From that, we are shouldering the responsibility of society. That is to say that in China, there are a lot of craftsmen, and in China, we have initiated a program to gather all the craftsmanship, and we offer support to transfer their masterpiece into products and from products to the commercials. So that such kind of craftsmen can get some decent respect from the society and get some value of their own. So the Mao-Kin radio is not focused on the traditional one, and we are not only about the old feelings, so we are focusing on the combination and integration with the Internet. And in the future, we are going to focus more on the human care and also the connection with humans, and we are striving for it. And in the future, our products will continue to expand the market in China, and also I hope that the other parts of the world will like our products in China. I hope that our products can connect well with the people in Europe and the world. Thank you very much. Okay, we have to hurry a bit, and now we have the youngest speaker. Even though he is the youngest, he actually guides and well guides millions of Chinese through the jungle of the cities in China. So his company, Bright Beacon, is the first IoT company that provides indoor navigation solutions to the Chinese customers. So welcome, Rang Ying from Bright Beacon. Hello. So I'm talking in English. In Chinese, our company is called Bright Beacon. I am the CEO, Rang Ying of the company. Before entering my topic, please allow me to explain something. We all know that in China, there are a huge amount of people. There are a lot of shopping malls and a lot of beautiful, scenic sports. So in summary, China is really big. And in the time of internet, we all know Alibaba, which enables us to make some indoor shopping. The advent of internet has brought about a lot of problems, which still needs to be solved. If I go to a shopping mall, I don't know what can I buy here, and what are the latest promotions today. And also, I cannot find the shop that I want and cannot find the toilet. For example, where is my car after I shop? For the shop, there are a lot of customers. I want to know who is my targeted group of customers and how could I improve my services? All these things are not solved with the advent of the internet. So there are commonalities between such problems. For example, in a certain scenario, if we can assure that the customers are positioned in such scenarios, we can find some solutions probably. So our company wants to bring up their experience based on the locations of the LTP platform. This is the intelligence hardware, whereas there are commonalities, because they are all based on the Apple and Ibeacon protocol. What is Ibeacon protocol? It was released by Apple based on the Bluetooth. The devices in compliance with the protocol can sense very accurately the position of the location. And based on this process location, we have provided the clouding for them so that we can better manage the hardware and also generate very precise information and then share information together with our partners and for further analysis and also the customer description. And we have an indoor navigation system and other systems. And we have some examples to illustrate such theory. First of all, we may notice that in China, there are more than 2,000 traditional businesses which are going to be reformed through IoT. When we are going to the shopping mall and we take out our smartphone, we can very precisely know where I am and I can search for where I want to go. And the navigation system can help us to go there very precisely. And actually, to calculate, we solve this problem. As long as we lay our devices of beacon, then everything will be very well solved. And such navigation system solution has been explored for so many years. But why is beacon the best one, the best suitable one? And we can make some comparisons. For example, indoor shopping, the GPS signal is very weak and we have Wi-Fi and I-Fi ID and they all have some disadvantages. For example, the Wi-Fi needs 7 or 8 seconds to get some information. So it is not very good for navigation. Only beacon, for example, it has Bluetooth connection. It can interact directly with cell phones. And such gadgets with a button on it, this is a very ordinary battery which can work for over two years. So it is very convenient. So through this system, we can hold shopping mall into our smartphone. So in such location scenario, whether the customers can interact with the scenario, this is a question. So we have corporate with Super App in China and we make some interconnections. As long as the customers of that app turn on the Bluetooth, they can get all the information. For example, the promotions and also the maps through this systems, we can get services with precise location. And for example, if we enter a restaurant and the restaurants send me the menu automatically to me. Through the whole arrangement and layout of such system, we have accumulated a lot of effective data. And the analysis of this data is a great help for the manufacturers, auto sellers to improve their service level. And just now we have mentioned that all these scenarios need our intelligent hardware. But such hardware can be integrated in all of the electronic appliances. For example, the light, it is connected through the Bluetooth and it will become a very good juncture of intelligence in order to locate more precisely where it is. And apart from the applications that I mentioned, there are still a lot of areas. For example, China has more than 1,000 send exports and museums, which can also apply such application and system. And when we are going to the matrilational palace in China, there are video guides. We press a button, and such devices are used. If we apply beacon, then it can automatically locate where you are and to give you information on that precise spot. So through this technology, for example, a lot of scenario spots here in Berlin can be replaced by this system. For the kindergartens, there are a lot of application scenarios. For example, this is a problem of the children's safety, which is of such great importance by the parents and also by the teachers. For example, if the information that the children has gone to school and this information will be automatically sent to the parents or to the teachers, then it will be very good. And the cloud beacon is there. So everything that we want to do is to equip the children with our system, with our gadgets. So all the spurs of the, all the roots of the children can be traced by our parents and by our teachers. And also in the home appliances, we can realize the scenario of automatically opening the door. And we are no longer in need. We're no longer leads to do something very troublesome. So we hope that our efforts will let more customers enjoy services more simply. So we call this scenario the scenario IoT. Please remember us. Thank you very much. Okay. So thank you very much for staying to the end. And then Geek Park will later put their contact on the screen. So if anyone wants to know more about China's innovation and the community, Geek Park is the best door leading to that. You can contact them directly. Thank you very much.
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New ways of thinking and creative applications of technology innovation, as a set of genes, are being planted into various fields in China. They provide a new lens to see and think about the reshaping of many industries, and corresponding influences over city, society, economy, and environment – higher efficiency, more added-value, upgraded consumption led by new products & services, etc.
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10.5446/20623 (DOI)
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QI want the presentation to get ready for a terrorist attack. Let's go ahead for the interview with President Bruno Obassino. Hi. So I'm very happy to be here. And as you will notice, my English accent is not very good. So you can read my text on the screen while I am speaking. So that is easier for everyone. So I would like to reflect today on revolt, democracy, and digital practices. These are not theoretical questions in my view. They are questions of ethics. I would like to try to understand what we are, which is to say how we live our political lives, how we are constituted as political subjects. What would it mean to live a new kind of political life and discover a new language of politics? I think we take far too little account of the fact that the space of contestation is one of the most codified spaces of social life. Descent is always conducted according to established forms, strikes, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying, civil disobedience, and even violent riots constitute recognized forms of descent. I believe that today we need to rethink our relationship to the political. We need to reformulate what it means to act politically. Today I intend to put some distance between my reflection and the ways in which other theorists address these questions. In recent years, critical thought has been fascinated by grand protest movements and large mass gatherings occupied Wall Street, the Indignados, the Arab Spring, and the large protests in Turkey. Experts have described these mobilizations as spaces in which politics is bearing renewed. Contemporary analysis of democracy tend to be defined as analysis of sites, squares, and public forms of gathering and occupation. Zuccotti Park in New York, Tarik Square in Egypt, and Taksim Square in Istanbul are viewed as spaces where practices have occurred that should concern us if we want to reformulate our analysis of democracy, capitalism and inequality, globalization, and social justice. These sites become the embodiment of a developing democratic practice. As assembled together, bodies become visible and thereby render visible the formation of a body politic. The democratic character of these movements is thus not based on their demands or their expectations, but rather lies in the very form of their existence. The political action at work in this concerted mass assembly renders visible the construction of a we, a political community which affirms itself as the people. Obviously, it is not my intention to question the importance of these movements. Rather, I am more interested in discussing how political theory has often placed these movements at the heart of its conversations. We have internalized certain ways of thinking about democracy which has led us to consider certain forms of expression as more political or more democratic than others. Governments like Occupy or Nudebou in Paris know, regenerate or regenerate a classical image of politics as codified from Kantianism up to Anna Haarent and they evoke a number of its most clearly established concepts, public space, citizenship, assembly, we, community, all the concepts synthesized in the formula we, the people. It is this way of thinking politics that I would like to interrogate. I think it is necessary to question this paradigm and consider how it imposes its own modes of censorship and concealment. The task of criticism is not to reclaim institutionalized categories to make them work as if they were self-evident. In doing so, we would want the risk of being governed by them. Instead, we must analyze that which remain undemocratic within them, what they hide, what they prevent us from seeing. The task of criticism is to unmask the mechanisms of power wherever they are hidden. My thesis is that it is precisely the scattered and solitary actions of Snowden, Assange and Manning and other hackers, whistleblowers, activists that break with traditional politics even in its most radical form. It is there that we find a space in which to invent new political practices. What seems very important to me in the actions of Snowden or Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning in the struggles of anonymous or weakly is that they express their aspiration to constitute a form of political subjectivity that escapes the processes by which we are produced as citizens in liberal democracy. They act in order to extend the space of choice, that is to say the space of democracy. They constitute an attempt to leave the experiences of which we are dispossessed once we are fashioned as citizens. In relation to the order of citizenship, Snowden, Assange and Manning are the embodiments of counter-subjects. I am not saying that they are models, we should imitate, but they do allow us to interrogate our political scene. Leaks, the actions of anonymous, the lives of Snowden, Assange and Manning, do not fit within the traditional frameworks of politics. Anonymous for example is not a group. The actions of anonymous does not contribute to the formation of a public space or a body politic. Leaking is an act that is individual and not collective. All of these actions are deployed using modalities that evade traditional political categories and all of this means that the concepts with which we often approach politics do not speak to politics in its essence. Instead, this concept merely references one possible version of democracy that has been imposed through the course of history. I guess this is why we are so moved by figures like Snowden, Assange or Manning. They challenge us. They steer us away from our established perceptions. It is for this reason that we experience such difficulty finding the right words to describe them. We lack the language to name them and we lack the vocabulary to properly recognize them. It is thus necessary to reflect on our categories in order to situate them within the parameters of our discourse. Snowden, Assange and Manning, should not accordingly simply be considered whistleblowers whose actions are solely geared toward disseminating information. Instead, I propose to treat them as exemplary figures who are creating a new art of politics, a different way of understanding what it means to resist. My argument concerning political invention does, however, run up against an objection. When we designate the actions of Snowden, Assange or Manning, we often use a classical category, namely civil disobedience. To interpret the actions of Snowden, Assange or Manning as examples of civil disobedience is to render them contiguous with the great democratic struggles of the 19th and the 20th centuries. I would therefore interpret this classification as a rhetorical operation. Because we don't have the words to name that which is new, we fall back on older categories. I also believe that this designation is a matter of strategy. When new movements emerge, they are by nature precarious and fragile, and uncertain of themselves. We thus have a tendency to want to assign them some legitimacy by inscribing them alongside movements that already occupy an important symbolic place in our political imaginary. I know very well that Snowden or Manning also use these same categories when speaking about themselves. But I think they are mistaken, and I think it is important to think about how and why they are mistaken about themselves. They are inventing new subjectivities without being aware of it. Civil disobedience is not one mode of protest amongst others. It is the form of revolt that makes the most contentious use of categories of liberal democracy, notions of law, citizenship, and of constitutionalism. Therefore, the gap separating the actions of Snowden, as in Manning, from civil disobedience marks the critical place in which we can see the novelty of what is transpiring through them. It is there that the crisis of traditional politics, notions of public space, of collectivity, of citizenship, of state is being played out. Today, I would like to focus on the practice of fleeing. I was struck by how Snowden and Assange have connected their political gestures and speech to practice of fleeing. One of the acts that conditions Snowden's approach was the necessity of escaping the United States and making sure he would not be extradited once he left Hong Kong. Similarly, Assange has continually changed countries. He has always linked his will to expand his activities with a constant reassessment of his place of residence in order to find the political and legal system that will offer him the necessary guarantees and protection. He has sleeved successively in Australia, Germany, England, and has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. The decision to flee and the associated practice of seeking asylum seems very significant to me specifically for our conception of an ethic of belonging, commitment, and territoriality. Of course, it is always possible to argue that the significance of fleeing is self-evident. Assange and Snowden were simply trying to avoid repression. And no doubt, such an interpretation is not completely wrong. But either same time, we should not dwell on these overly evident interpretations. The practice of demanding asylum and its way of linking political action, expatriation, and the demand for protection raises important political problems. There is a game I play here that questions the idea of membership that we too often spontaneously associate with national structures. Snowden and Assange have, in a very practical manner, initiated a mode of revolt that has allowed us to think differently about the category of politics and about the relationship we continually maintain with the state. They allow us to ridicule the democratic question by helping us take better account of the problem of inclusion, nationality, and citizenship. The singularity of the practice of fleeing appears very clearly when it is contrasted with civil disobedience. Fleeing and civil disobedience constitute perhaps the two arts of revolt that are most opposed in terms of their antagonistic modes of subjectivity and the different ways they relate to the law, the state, and to others. Texts on disobedience, such as those of Jacques Derrida or John Rose, for instance, always articulate the importance of this practice by the way in which it conforms a society with itself, by the way it mobilizes a society's own fundamental values, its constitution, in order to critique its laws or its actual organization. It is in the name of fidelity to the essential values of a nation that one decides to dissent to the ways in which its laws are applied. Civil disobedience thus intends to perfect the laws of the national community. The subject of civil disobedience is constituted as a political subject by affirming his or her belonging to the legal community that he or she is addressing. In a sense, the subject of civil disobedience is the most faithful member of community, the one most bound by its essential values. It is on its behalf and in the name of the demands that it embodies that its subject engages in political struggle. The fidelity to the spirit of community, and it is precisely this notion of community spirit and all shared values that seems problematic to me, is evident in the fact that disobedience is generally thought as a legalistic practice. Civil disobedience accepts their sentence. Thorough agreed to go to prison for not paying his taxes. But fleeing, leaking information and taking refuge elsewhere, as Snowden did, is to constitute oneself as a political subject in a very different way. If we ridiculise Snowden's gesture, we see that its aim is not merely to change his political community, but to change off political community, to challenge the very notion of belonging to a political community as such. The civil disobedience adheres to his nation and seeks to transform its laws. Snowden conversely, and the same could be said for Assange, engages in a practice of desubjectification that compels him to detach himself from his nation. At one point, he decided to leave, to flee, to separate. This is less an act of disobedience than an act of resignation. Sometimes actions do not say, I disobey to change my political community, but rather say I am abandoning my membership, I am going into refuge, I am exempting myself from this political community, I am rejecting my nationality, hence his numerous application for asylum. What is at stake here is a reflection on the relationship between politics, belonging and community. It seems to me that the traditional political practice is founded on the depoliticisation of our inscription as subjects of the state. We take our national membership for granted in our conception of ourselves as political subjects and when we say we the people. A depoliticisation of the question of membership structures political theory. We see this in the notion of civil disobedience. When it comes to an act like disobedience, I recognise that the law applies to me, but I decide despite this not to follow it. In other words, I can decide to disobey a law only if it is recognised as my own, and thus only if I inscribe myself within the community over which the law reigns. In contrast, Snowden's approach consisted in emancipating himself from the legal order of exiting the space of its enforcement. By fleeing, by requesting asylum, Snowden constituted himself as a political subject that exercises the right of sedition. Since too, has not stopped moving. These figures are thus the embodiment of legal subjects that retain the right to refuse the law. They refuse to submit and appear before the law, and thus they politicise a question that is normally depoliticised. To what community do I belong? And why? And by what right? Why should the state decide that for me? These gestures could question the very idea that we should recognise the state as ours, and that we should recognise ourselves as a member of a community of citizens for no other reason that we were arbitrarily thrown into the world in one place rather than another, and the state could hold us at birth. I believe that it is necessary to take a radical stance here. And I would like to propose the idea that what we are witnessing today is the birth of a new political category for individuals who are not defined by their membership in a state or a nation or territory, but rather belong to a community they have chosen for themselves, democracy. Given their democratic ideals come into conflict with their membership in a nation, the citizens of democracy divorce themselves from their state and find ways to continue their activities such as seeking asylum, for example. What we are seeing here then is a foreshadowing of a kind of politics that is no longer imagined as an organisation of a territory, a city, or as the performative constitution of a we, as is almost always otherwise the case. Politics now becomes a practice in which new political communities are produced and imagined, and in which membership or belonging is not situated at the beginning of the process but at the end. It is not the point of departure but the horrible point. And I almost done. I propose to designate this process as a denationalisation of the mind. And perhaps we can find here a prefiguration of what Marx called an international. I do not believe that this process has risen from a void. It has a real basis. I believe that it is an effect that is produced by the Internet, which is to say that the Internet makes possible the politicisation of the question of belonging. It is surely no accident that Snowden describes his relationship to the Internet as a thought experiment through which he formed a new relationship to the world. We do not measure the point at which our mind is framed by national structures, nor do we measure the point at which our universe, our actuality, our mental space was imposed upon us by the accident of our birth. We live in a state of permanent heteronomy. And I wonder whether the Internet represents a space of counter-socialisation, where individuals learn to forge new links and create their own kind of mental space. I cannot say with any certainty whether this is possible or if it is correct. Nonetheless, I think the Internet opens up possibilities for thinking differently about one's inscription within the world, to whom and to what one feels a connection, and with what kinds of things one becomes concerned. The Internet redefines questions of proximity, of distance and of limits. It enables an expansion of association and reinstalls the question of attachment to others within the domain of choice. The relationship that may exist between the Internet and the predisposition to leak or the betrayal might be explained by the relationship between the Internet and the solution of traditional allegiances and the disposition to demand the right to choose our world or to go away. Conclusion. It's a pre-election. Reinventing politics is not only about discovering new objects of contestation or new topics of descent. It's also about reflecting on our modes of action. It's about trying to invent a new style of political life. What does it mean to move beyond citizenship? What would it mean to belong to democracy rather than a state? How do we think politics without public space or a province, without a body politic? These are the questions that Snowden and St. John Mining invite us to confront today. We need to think of an emancipatory practice that no longer deploys the long-distance of public space, public commitment or obedience to the state and the law, than one which might give rise to a politics of sedition, of dissidence, and of critic of belonging. Of course, we have great difficulty imagining what form such a politic might take. The history of democracy and revolt remains to be written. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for my side as well. We will have time for questions. As we have seen with the Panama Papers and the Zide Papers recently, courage can be contagious. Is there anyone who has a question? Okay. Thank you very much, I really enjoyed your...I still need to read your book as of the last one. Concerning civil disobedience, I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Germany we have Article 20. We don't call it constitution, we call it Grundgesetz because of our whole history, Holocaust, etc. And in Article 20 we call it the disobedience law, and I was wondering if you have also this kind of law in France, because I also know that in the UK they even don't have written down the freedom of press, etc., in their constitution because everything is still based about the Bactina Carta. I'm sorry, I'm going to be there because I don't hear you. You don't hear me? No, you don't. So I'm going to listen there. Excuse me. We can talk like that. Okay, we can talk like that. Excuse me, you have understood my question, thank you. I have a question because normally we have laws in our constitution, we call it the disobedience law. And I wonder, in France, you also have disobedience laws in your constitution. Okay. In fact, it's true that in France civil disobedience is a political practice, but there is absolutely no protection for people who claim they are doing civil disobedience action. So in the constitution or in the laws, even if you claim you are doing something criminal, but you say it's civil disobedience, you have absolutely no protection in the legal order and you are going to be punished and you are going to go to jail. But what is very interesting for me in that matter is that precisely in civil disobedience, you always find people who want to go to jail, who say that going to jail is part of the deal. You know, when you protest against what you believe it's an illegal law, okay, about gay marriage, about genetically modified organism, for example, they always accept the sentence and they kind of demonstrate and show themselves as subjects submitted to the law and to the state. So what my idea is that civil disobedience is a very important practice, of course, and I always support people doing this kind of practice, but I kind of reflect of why should the subject should suffer because of its political action and because the state does bad things or companies do bad things. So I think that the civil disobedience can be thought to as a conservative practice in this manner. You know, it's something very subversive in some point, in some ways, but it has some conservative aspects too and with the recognition of the state with the idea that you always constitute the constitution as your reference, okay? So in fact, you have to recognize the constitution as yours and to ratify the values of the constitution. You cannot change them. You have to recognize them as your point of departure. So there are a lot of conservative, I don't know, statements as the basis of this practice and that's why I believe that perhaps we can use examples like Snowden, Assange and Manning to develop new democratic practices that would help us to imagine new ways of resisting the state today. Now. More questions from the audience? Hand sign, please. Okay. Then thank you very much again. Okay. One last. Just concerning international versus transnational because technology actually introduces this transnational thing because satellites are transnational beaming down to the name. I was wondering why because you asked the question, what is the next stage after democracy, citizen democratizing, et cetera. Have we not already in a state because of the technology advancement in the last 20 years that they're building new more military strides? you you of of States Beyond states, I don't know how to say that so I think the the idea of democracy is precisely now to have real International institution with powers with who can oblige the state to do things and who can intervene In order to for them to act democratically. No, I guess that would be my answer Thank you very much for the very good questions. Have a good day
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Snowden, Assange, and Manning are the protagonists of a movement that is questioning the very ground we stand on, the dispositives defining our present. As such, they enable us both to think in a new way and to interrogate received ways of thinking about politics, democracy, action et resistance. Their very lives invite us to imagine other modes of relation to the law, the Nation, citizenship, the State, etc.
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10.5446/20626 (DOI)
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Music Ah, okay. Thanks, Roland. Yes, hi. Good morning, everybody. And thanks for the short introduction, Christina. And yes, thanks to Republika for having us here today. Yes, I will introduce my peers over there in a minute. But let me give you a short introduction to our talk. My name is Nille Heizer, by the way. I'm a digital media researcher, but I will introduce myself later. You know, if you have been here the last days, you might have realized that hate, speech, online harassment, and all of these things are quite, yeah, are issues which have been discussed a lot in several sessions and talks. And yes, actually, we could say this is the ugly face of online communication. And it is an issue, of course, and we've seen in media coverage about gaming, communities, etc. We see extreme cases, many times, like this case by Caroline Cinders. She wrote about it last year. She had some users, online users send a SWAT team to the house of her mom. So we could say this is really an extreme case which is rather unlikely to happen to us, probably, but we cannot deny that online harassment and wishes, online behavior, like cyber bullying, flaming, etc., is a problem. So if you look at the research, for example, a study from PewDiePie Research in 2014, they found that 4 in 10 internet users are victims of online harassment of different types, of course, but they also found that 73% of iOS internet users have seen someone be harassed in some way online. A study from this year from Norton also showed that almost half of female users they were asking about online harassment had actually experienced online harassment and almost 80% of women under 30 had experienced different forms of online harassment. So we could say that harmful behavior is actually an everyday life reality for many people. So this is not a form, these are not extreme cases, but we need to find ways and also means or tools, whatever, to talk about these things and also to work against them. We are here today, a team of four, to talk about this wishes, online behaviors from another angle, not so much from a regulatory perspective or law perspective, for example, but more from an ethical perspective. And we chose the topic of online community management as one focus because of all four of us, we are working on it from different perspectives on these issues of online communication and community management. And I'm really glad to have you here, there is Kelly Woodrow, and then we have Thorsten Butch and Roland Punter. And as I said, my name is Mila Heise. So the modus operandi today is that we will give short presentations to present something about our work, what is our perspective on ethical issues and community management, and afterwards we will hopefully have some time for Q&A. And we'd also like to learn about your perspective on this issue. Okay, so first up we start with Thorsten. Thorsten is currently working as a wizarding assistant professor at the University of Constance, he's also a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, and affiliated with Concordia in Canada. So come here. All right, ma'am. It's your stage, the stage is yours. Merci beaucoup. Hi there, good morning everybody. So we're being audio streamed today and people outside there see the video stream of this. So I introduce myself to the outside world as being a business ethicist looking like this. Could the audience please clap for just one second to signal to the audience that I do look in fact exactly like this. Please clap right now. Merci beaucoup. That is very kind of you. So that is what a business ethicist looks like, right? Like it's important to have a white beard, it signifies wisdom, it's important to have truth in your hands, right? Like the Ten Commandments, and it's important to look really fierce and mean because we like dissing people. So I'm showing you this because that is kind of the job description according to I think a lot of people. They think business ethicists are just mean, wise, crackin' people who bitch and moan about companies all the time. That's one misconception though and another one is that you can expect ethicists to give you something like Campbell's condensed business ethic soup. IEA, ready-made solution for every ethical problem you could possibly have in any given context. And so I'm very sorry to disappoint you right away but that's not what we're going to offer. Because ethics is about you figuring out your own shit, not us telling you what to do. And so my job here is to sort of just frame this conversation a teeny tiny bit in terms of ethics, but not to tell you how we can fix online community management once and for all. So now looking at this card here from the card game Munchkin that you might know, we talk about trolling here. And this is a level 10 net troll, mind you, has no special powers and is really mad about it. So the question is what to do really when it comes to trolling, right? And for the longest time this is what companies did when they ran an online game or an online forum or some kind of online community, right? As long as the dollars came in and you could sort of very conveniently put them into your ears and across your eyes and into your mouth, you didn't have to do anything, right? You didn't have to listen, you didn't have to do anything because the rationale was, well as long as we have customers, we don't want to mess with them, right? We don't want to scare them away and tell them to behave nicer and we don't have to because we still keep having customers, right? So there's just no need to do anything. And that went on for something like 20 years and the past like three, four years have brought like scandal after scandal after scandal and increasing amount of online outrage about companies not actually intervening. And so intervening now is often what they do, which then looks like this, which means it's a very clumsy sliding tackle very often. It's not very well sought out and you probably will get a red card for this if you do it wrong as a company, right? So this is the part where I need to introduce a concept. Don't be scared, it's not very complicated. So I'm going to talk very briefly about instrumental corporate social responsibility, which is sort of a concept that you can see when companies try to justify why they're intervening. And this is not an Apple product, even though it looks like it, right? But we need to talk about corporate social responsibility first. So that's basically the idea that companies do have different responsibilities than just to print money. And you have, of course, just zero agreement within the discipline of business ethics on what that actually entails, but that's not a bug, that's a feature. So we know that somehow we need to deal with responsibility issues with businesses. We can't agree on what that actually means, but what we do agree on is that instrumental corporate social responsibility, by and large, is bullshit. Because that means you, the company running an online community, you help them out against harassment if and only if there's a financial benefit to you, right? The idea is, well, I'd really like to help you out to your community, but there's just no financial incentive for us to do it, so we're just going to keep doing what we've been doing. And what you really need to sort of argue there is, well, don't people maybe have dignity and deserve to be treated as people and not just as customers, right? So you can use this gentleman's theory here, that's Emmanuel Kant, of course, to argue, to take community seriously because people are people and they deserve to be treated with dignity and not just as a means to an end, a means to an end being profit, right? So that is a point that I really want us to get back to in the conversation we're going to be having. People deserve to be treated as people with dignity just intrinsically, right? You don't need a profit motivation to help somebody out. If you observe a person drowning and you say, well, I'd really like to help you out right now, it seems to me that that's the right thing to do, but you sure need to offer me an incentive for helping you out here because, you know, like, my motivational structure is kind of capitalist, I can't do anything about it, but then you know you're doing something wrong and it's the same, holds true for online community management, I think. And sort of turning that into a normative ideal of how to run a community, of course, you just end up being somehow confronted with discourse ethics one way or another. This is Jürgen Habermas, everybody knows him, of course, so I just wanted to show a pretty picture. But the idea there is that we actually need to install a process of involving everybody in the community in a conversation about how we want to run that community and everybody needs to have their say, right? It's not just about those ones who are the loudest having their say, it's about everybody in the community having their say. That's kind of the point of discourse ethics in a nutshell. I just saved you like five semesters of time in grad school. And the point there is that you want to involve every stakeholder here, right? And very often when you read about online community management and online harassment, all these kinds of things, right? When you're European, you call for the state to regulate this, right? When you're American, you call for business to regulate this because you don't want Washington to be messing with things. What I would like to call for is for community to be taken seriously, right? And sort of actually involve those that are affected by the harassment in the regulation and the governance of that harassment. And I've done a little bit of business consulting in my time and you would be surprised at just like how many managers come to you asking, oh, Mr. Wise Business Ethics guy, could you please tell us what to do? We have this issue with whatever employees or some community. And we'd really like to figure this out and we really want to do the right thing. And then if you ask them, well, did you ever talk to the people you're talking about here? Then they're like, no, that's not what management does, right? And so it's kind of sad, really. But this is literally like ethics is not rocket science. And that it's also really important to just involve the people that this is about, right? So that is one thing I want you to sort of remember. The other thing is tech is not neutral, right? It always comes with built in values. And so the idea that business is neutral is just as stupid as the idea that technology is neutral. And you can see this with these gentlemen here, right? Who took 10 years to finally understand that some white dudes in San Francisco who never saw it that women or people of color could be harassed on their service, right, need to actually take this seriously and regulate this kind of stuff, right? But it took them forever to figure that out because they built their product with specific values and specific norms in mind, right? And the idea that somebody could be harassed via their service is just seemed to be outrageous to them and just unimaginable. So the point that I want to really drive home here is that there's intrinsic moral value in community, which means if you run any kind of community, better take them seriously and take them seriously for their own sake, not because you need a financial incentive for this. And the second thing is that we can discuss later on, right? Like tech companies then are currently finally sort of coming around to the idea that they're actually allowing harm to happen and that that's bad, right, and they want to now intervene and take a do no harm approach to what they're doing. But doing no harm is just not enough, right? They also need to actively involve, get involved to influence the online culture that we have, which just happens to be a reflection of the offline culture we have, which just happens to be sexist and racist and all kinds of unpleasant things, right? So the idea is that companies need to actually get involved and try to make a positive impact on culture. With that, I'm going to give this to Kelly. Thank you. Hello, I'm Kelly Bujaro. I am a games lecturer at Brunel University London. I teach game studies to game design students. And I want to talk about, a little bit about managing the mayhem from the top. So top-down regulation and some of the problems with it and some of the things that we can do to move forward. Okay. So I want to start with terms of services and user license agreements, which is the most exciting topic on the planet. But one of the things that we need to realize is that while it is a very legally structured, it's there for a purpose to protect the companies, et cetera and so forth. You know, everybody when they're playing a game, and my research is around game user research, is the idea that it doesn't matter what the content is in these end user ULAs in terms of services for the player, they just want to scroll down, click that they've read and agree to get on playing their game. And the problem is, is that you find in contract in the sense that you said you've read it, except there's a lot of clauses in it and a lot of things that people just skip over. So one of the things to think about is how can we kind of make this a bit more accessible to the communities that are playing the games that you're putting out there. I don't expect anyone to read this text, but it's just an example. The top one is an extract from a terms of service from Club Penguin, which is an online MMO for children 6 to 14 years old. And the bottom one is the terms of service, the code of conduct for World of Warcraft, which is 18 and plus. But if you look at it, it is exactly the same language. And so if you're expecting someone from 6 to 14 to kind of understand the differences between what is violent or vulgar versus somebody over the age of 18, you might want to communicate that information a bit better. The other thing to consider is that these things mean things to different cultures. So in online games that cross boundaries, geographical and cultural boundaries, what is considered to be offensive might be different for different communities. So it's really important to think about communicating these types of terms and services to the intended audience or the demographic of your game. The other type of top-down regulation I want to talk about is what Kendra Albert calls creative interventions. And so this was in Guild Wars 2 on their forums in 2012, if I remember correctly. And there's a link on the slide if you want to read her full discussion about it. But on Guild Wars forums, you're not allowed to swear or use any offensive language. And what the designers had decided to do is replace, they created a list of offensive words and put the word kitten. So anytime you would swear, it would be replaced automatically by code to say kitten. So if you said bullshit, it's bull kitten. And so it kind of, through the forums, it kind of was well received because it had the potential of diffusing potentially problematic and toxic behavior through comedic relief. But through this cartoon, it mentions, you know, this was not in the terms of service. So while it's a creative solution, it's fundamentally still a top-down solution because they never, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but they never really dated with the online community to say what words are offensive to you and is kitten the best term to be replaced. You know, I mean, why not puppy because dogs are awesome too. Another way to do, kind of, to regulate online behavior in an extreme way, again, with Club Penguin, is a chat, they have safe space chat rooms, which is, you can communicate, and if you're under 10 years old, you can only communicate through these drop-down menus. So they have special events so that they have new categories that you can choose from. This is just the generic one, so depending on who you want to talk to it, you want to say to them. But everything is confined to what the designers choose to be acceptable conversation for an age group. They do have a 10 and over chat room, or I think it's 10 to 16, which they allow a little bit more freedom, but it is still very strictly regulated. And then finally, it's quite not very clear on this slide, but in World of Warcraft, this is a way to regulate or create a set of digital afford, technological affordances is to create different types of play opportunities. So this is one of the daily quests that you can choose from. On the bottom, this side is PvE, which is player versus environment, and on the other side, you can choose to play player versus player. And what this does is it sets up an expectation of the type of behaviors that is afforded by the game. So if you're playing on the PvE server, you're playing against the environment. The idea is that it is cooperative, even though it's still a competitive game for resources. You tend to do your thing either with your group and go forward. In the PvP section, you can attack each other, players can enter combat with each other, and if you're doing a quest and somebody kills you, chances are you might curse at them and it kind of escalate towards a problematic behavior. But the thing is that that's an affordance of the design. This is something that can be regulated and you can create the types of spaces that you want your players to engage in. And then finally, the last one that I want to talk about is community management, which Roland will talk about in more depth shortly. But the thing about community management and community managers is that fundamentally, it's a good step in the right direction, but in the games industry, it's still not a very respected position. It's a low-paying position. It's a difficult challenge. If you want to watch this video, which is by Extra Credits, that talks about how game companies can start screening people for online game communities. But the thing is that fundamentally, they are an employee of the company. Their goal is to regulate police, maintain the rules and the codes of conduct that's created by the company. But on the other hand, they also have to create, their job is to maintain the community side of things to make sure that it is a safe space that players want to engage in and continue to play. And without the instrumentalist aspect that Torsten was mentioning, it's not just about making sure people keep playing to keep paying, but it's that you want people to have this community. And on that note, I will let Roland talk about community management a bit more. Thank you very much. Hello. Perfect. So, first thing I have to do is I want to ask you, who of you is working as a community manager or social media manager? So, arms up. Okay, we can go. We are finished now. So, I'm in the board of the Association for German Community Managers, and we are doing a little bit of providing the necessary list. We are going to show how these new jobs have to be defined and what kind of work there has to be included. So, let's start. I managed my speech with some hashtags. It may be 100 or so. And I start with community management. And when we talk about community management in the business context, it's often an idea of doing marketing. We heard it from Torsten already. So, the idea we send information to the crowd is established in community. It's already today used by companies in the idea of doing community management. And there's no idea that community management is a better way to get in contact with people. And that brings me to my next hashtag. Who thinks community management is easy? Which is the or? So, it's easy to create a fantastic community if you have a good product or a good idea or a good service. So, they come to you just right now. But it isn't easy if your company doesn't fit to a system of ethics and values that is respected in the area you are working at. So, I have an idea about community management, what I describe as a good neighborhood. So, it's not a place where you put your marketing blah blah. If you visit American cities, there are parts with a really nice, with English, and other places with lots of graffiti. What's the difference in this separate communities in a bigger city? So, that's the situation we have on the Internet. We have places with well-gardening and we have places with the ugly face of communication we talk about today. So, we are talking a lot about it at the Republic. And why is it so? What can we do as a community manager to watch out that we not get this hate speech so visible? And I'm sorry. So, we can do it with law. And we have to do law. And you have an etiquette or rules of engagement by managing your community. Okay. It's an accepted method to organize the social work together. So, I think law is an interesting point. And when we talk about it in our association, it's really one of these things we need to do to handle in a way that other people understand. And we have a problem because on the one side, we do the legislative with creating law. And the other side, we have to be the executive by prisoning people or put them out of our community. So, it's a little bit different because in our social society, we have that in different positions. And that's one of the points we have problems with. And you see it at the moment at the discussion that Facebook is creating while our state is going to Facebook and say, sorry, don't provide this hate speech so much. So, it's a little bit difficult. Why has the infrastructure to do this job? I don't believe that's the work of infrastructure delivery. So, it's more the job of community managers. And we have to accept that companies that create communities at these platforms have to have a look on it. And they have to accept border crossing as one of these things that our community not only is on one platform. So, we have communities moving over different platforms. And if this happened, we have to use different tools on different platforms. So, it means a new mindset which accepts that we don't have tools like executives have to manage these negative voices. And I'm sorry, I need my text. So, to do this, we have to do an investment. Companies don't like this because of investment is not the idea of business because of really like more earning money. So, the investment is in education. And everyone of you who's working at the job, I do it since more than 10 years. And in the beginning, there was no one who can talk about positive things or something he did before. So, we have to try out everything by ourselves. That's not the situation now. We have really well-known experts in this area. We have at the universities so much content about this, so much practical background on this, so much studies about this. So, that we are in a world full of information. So, it must be easy for each of you to manage these negative things in the communities. One really hard fact that this could work is connect your community to the offline world. You have to meet your influencers live, maybe here at the Republic, so that you can get a better contact to your community. And if you all, you know all your influencers in your community, it is easy for you to identify each person who's doing wrong things in your community. You can contact him in two or three ways and solve your problem without being doing it in the public. So, that is one of the ideas we have by using offline in the online world. In the end, and that's the last point of me, we have to talk about a culture of being online in communities that is nearby the culture we do it in the real life. And we have to accept their rules and their places where I can do things and other places where I don't have to do it. In this culture, we have to transport and we make it more the same. So, I hope each of your professionals is doing this already. So, now I am finished and would like to send you to Naila with scale. Thank you. Yes, thank you Roland. I said it before in the introduction, I'm a digital media researcher and interested in digital media ethics. So, I want to talk a bit more about the problem of scale when we talk about online communities. Because what we do online is communicate in the end, and your communities, they are glued together by communication or miscommunication in many cases. So, maybe to come back a little bit to the question what ethics are, why we need them or why we need to discuss them. I really like this quote from 1978, so it's quite old, but I think it still applies, it's really simple. It says that ethics are guidelines and principles that help us to uphold our values. And they are not simply prohibitions, but they also support us in our positive responsibilities. And I want to emphasize this responsibility aspect. I think this is what all of you mentioned already. So, who is responsible? Is it the managers of the communities, the companies or the providers of communication platforms and so on. But as I said, I'm more interested in digital media communication, so we could think about online communication ethics. So, there are some scholars trying to set out some principles of online communication, and they refer of course to basic and universal human rights, human dignity, Habermas, discourse ethics and so on. I think this is a bit too much here. But I just want to point out some of these principles are things like mutual respect in communication, being authentic or selectively authentic, that our communication is mutual. That one is speaking and the other one is not answering. And I think this is really relevant if you think about community management. But also, and this is really important for me, the idea of person, to accept others as persons, to give them respect as persons, but also not to instrumentalize them. So, if you think about money only when it comes to community management, I would say this is instrumentalization by the people you are interacting with. Many of you are familiar with these things, I guess, because they are also the foundation of NetCADS guidelines, etc. Especially in forums, think of the beginning of the internet, then we had Chattacad and so on. So, we have some frameworks and guidelines already at play in many communication spaces we are now interacting with. However, the communication environments we are living in practically, as heavy online users, you might be familiar, but living in these media, they are large at scale. Think of Facebook over 1.5 billion users. Think of YouTube over, those are numbers by them. I didn't check, I didn't count everyone. And then even Twitter has 320 million users. So, we are in large scale communication environments. And also, as Roland already said, those platforms and environments are intersecting. People are moving from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube and at a large scale. So, this leads, in my opinion, to some kind of context collapse. Yeah, because you never know who are these people. Yeah, this is from community. You as community manager should be familiar with this series. So, the question is, I cannot know. I mean, this is the idea of community management, to know most of your users, how they are, how they communicate, what they want or what they don't want. But in large scale environments, this is absolutely impossible. And I think we have a lack of context. Those platforms have global reach. You can have anonymous profiles. There's a lack of social cues. There's also, I think, some communicative distance to most of those users. So, this is why these comment sections go wild all the time. This, I'd say, is one of part of the problem. And this is different because if we stand here and sit here together, this is face-to-face communication. So, we have an idea that this context of our interaction shapes to some extent how we will act and what we will say. So, we can adjust our tone or maybe change the way we present ourselves. So, in social media, you could say that parts of that are cut off or maybe removed or maybe more difficult. Maybe to see the expressions of those with whom we are communicating. Just one example. And while we, Marwick and Boyd, they call this context collapse through social media technologies. And there's another problem. It's not only the context which vanishes or which is harder to define or harder to grasp. It's also that we face multiple audiences on social media platforms. Here you have on Twitter, you have people from the US having their own hashtags or you have communities from New Zealand or from Germany or whatsoever. So, we have not only different languages but also different cultures involved on these platforms. And I think this makes it really hard to apply some of those ethical principles I mentioned before. When it comes to scale, there's also another problem. This is Mark Boros. He was a former moderator of the Guardian community. And he pointed out that scale matters in another way. He says that the worst experiences he had, he left the Guardian. So, he could write about this on the Guardian platform. The worst experiences he had was the belodoline involved large scale assaults by groups of people who wanted to ruin the community conversation either through a convergence of like-minded people. So, people decide, oh, we have the same opinion. Yeah, let's crash this conversation or by organization. So, he calls them agenda trolls and their idea is not to discuss but to ruin the conversation and which is basically really unethical behavior. And the problem here is you don't have like hundreds of people but thousands of people who are doing this together. So, this is what I mean with the question of scale and how we work or how we uphold our ethical principles and communication principles in a large scale environment. And there's another thing. I think it is really a problem nowadays when we talk about online conversations and comment sections, etc. It's social bots. So, we don't even know if we're talking about human beings anymore. And what's even worse, we also instrumentalize those bots. So, Ty is an excellent example. She was taught to misbehave. We could also think about ethical principles, not only if we talk to humans but also with bots. We don't have any idea for that yet, I would suggest. And we should start thinking about this. So, to come back to Mark Boros, he's actually an optimist. He's seen really awful stuff, I'd say, but he's an optimist. He believes that we can change the conversation and that we can become better by actually changing behavior. That does not only involve the Guardian itself, but also to respect the commenters and also respect the fact that harmful behavior causes pain in people, to realize that people are un-wolfed. And one of my questions or two questions I have is how can we create actually or promote and actually design a healthy environment or healthy communicative cultures? And how can we assure that they are based on shared norms and values? So, not top-down, but that we negotiate these aspects. And then the question of how to implement those universal rights and principles into those large-scale global communication environments. So, will we shape it, the future of online conversation, or will it be shaped for us, and what is our role? This was my short input, and thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, now it's my turn to be the moderator. If you want to, you can come more with me. Do we have mine? You're not being filmed. We're being difficult. Business docs, ethics are important. So, we have plenty of time actually, like 20 minutes now. And we would, first of all, would like to hear your opinions and also maybe your questions, as we have many community managers here in the room. Yeah, okay. There's a microphone over there. And, yeah, if nobody wants to ask something, we're also discussing a bit about it. Give them time to run away. Yeah, as you can see, we also have dogs on our slides, not only kittens. It's a fair share here. Hello, I have a question. But I think all of you are more cat people on this stage. I think here's one first question. Yeah, so maybe I've had over. Hello, thank you. My name is Mac Gerichter and I work for Norddeutscher Rundfunk as a social media manager and strategist. Thanks for the talk. I learned a lot, but I have one, excuse my poor English, like one remark. You talk about trolls. And I think it's important that we distinguish between trolls and haters. So, because trolls are very annoying, they destroy communication. They can kill online communities, but haters, that is something different. You know, that are people who post a lot of folks for heads and stuff. I don't know the English translation and they really hate, they are threatening people. And I think it's very important to distinguish between trolls and haters. So that's just my remark for your talk. Thank you. Yes, thank you actually because we did not include it in our times, but yeah, we share this oppression. It is really important not only to separate between different harmful online behaviors, because there's this multiplicity of things you can think of from trolling to cyberbolic stocking and so on. Yeah, but thanks for this point. I think this is also, yeah, this is part of conversation. Right, yeah, first of all, hi Micah. Ten years ago I cited your master's thesis and my master's thesis. Wow, know your community. That was a long time ago, but I want to... Pardon? I wrote my master thesis about open source. Right, exactly, exactly. Coffee afterwards. My point is the world is small, just proving the value of community. Also sorry for actually not ever saying this before. The point though is you raise a great point that in constitutional law we sort of cover, right, by giving people fundamental rights, like human rights and all that kind of stuff, right, that you are never in under no circumstance allowed to mess with, right. And then there's also sort of additional contractual obligations that we have as people between people, right. We regulate how we as citizens are allowed to interact with one another. And yes, there's a lot of research sort of coming out since like 2012 maybe on sort of like constitutional rights in digital context, right, like on sort of having a digital constitution for certain communities and all kinds of stuff. And those conversations I think like Kelly probably knows more about because it's often that online games have sort of pioneered this already, right, because you had online games way back when, and I think Raph Koster is the guy who wrote about this, right, in like 2002 already, where the question is if you run an online game community like Ultima Online or whatever in like the good old days, are your players just consumers or are your players citizens of this online space and do they have the right to actually have a say in conversations, right. And those were times where it was all just like sort of people messing with each other, like like stealing digital stuff or whatever kind of thing, right. Like it wasn't really the kind of real drama we've been seeing these past two, three years where the stuff that you talked about actually hit the fan really badly. So I think like that kind of stuff though is actually covered by real world law in real world textbooks and cases and all that kind of stuff. And I think it's very important to address those kinds of harassment as actual legal matters, not just being nice to a community, right. So you need to be serious about sort of foundation, the foundation of like actual human rights. Then there's sort of like levels of politeness and all kinds of stuff that we can discuss when it comes to community management, right. But everybody needs to be on the same page when it comes to human rights and those kinds of things, right. Pardon me? I'm going to shut up now. I think here are more questions. Yeah. Hi, Peter. I'm building a music community and I was curious if you've seen any developments around chatbots as mediators in community management. Is there anything happening there or anything working? This is the tool solution, the technology solution then. Actually, I'm not so much into that, but of course it's part of what we would say, is it a top-down approach then? Yeah, I haven't seen it in the online gaming community specifically, but it would be a top-down in the sense that it still has to be programmed by the dev community or whatever community is managing. So unless it's opening a conversation with the community, I think that that's... The example with the Microsoft bot is a bit of a dangerous kind of warning sign, so I'm... Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, that gives you like... I'm no expert on this obviously because I'm no expert on anything, but the point is you have two ways of dealing with this, right? Either you program a fixed algorithm or whatever kind of thing to then top-down regulate, right? Then you, the company, come up with like the ten commandments pretty literally and say, here's the bot that's gonna now interact with the community and just execute what we have decided is like, OK behavior, right, and just like, kill all behavior that's not been defined by us as acceptable. So that's not great. The other thing then is the TAY thing, right? Like, if you actually allow the bot to learn, yeah, that can go to like straight to hell real fast. So I feel like this is a thing where you're doomed either way, so I actually think it's a smarter move to trust people in making those calls and not just try to have smart people program something to be even smarter than people that just regularly fails. Actually, and you said technology is never neutral, so I mean a technologist or the functional solution, I think there's also the danger to miss the whole point of community management at all is getting to know the motives of people who are violating or who are doing harmful behavior. So there is this chance to get on conversation, you know, two years ago or so, I was involved in a larger research project. We did case studies at Tagesschau, Zutorchitz-Seitung, Freitag, and a political talk show at the Esther. I won't say the name, anonymous. And what we saw there, that users actually liked the community spaces, those media organizations created for themselves much better than Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. So the wild common sections or those wild communities out there on Twitter, they were saying like, no, I don't want to discuss there. And they really appreciated the fact that there were community managers and sometimes even journalists involved in the common sections. And many journalists thought if we get involved in heated discussions and debates, we can see how the tone gets adjusted. This was the idea of context and how to create this context. So I just heard that there are some media companies with huge forums on their websites who will never take a look at the forums anymore. So they gave up on their own website. In this very space, they can define and also do something about this. This is also a problem of having control over online environments, which is limited in many things. Like if you think about Facebook and what they might change or Twitter or so. So I would say, I would agree with Mark. He says we can't give up. We need to have ways to design conversations to give them constructive direction. But that would mean that everybody involved in the media organization would also have a say, would also have to acknowledge the fact that there's a community out there, that they're not just sending out everything anymore, but there is a feedback channel and to put some value on it. And not saying like, this is our crap corner, or this is like the bad neighborhood on our own website. So because bad comments and destructive conversation, they have a negative influence on your content. Just to kind of come back to the question though, I think you should have to ask yourself. To ask yourself, what is the goal of the monitoring? Are you just trying to regulate behavior? So as Torsten said, very top down, or you're trying to foster community. And if you're developing a music website, chances are you probably want to foster community and people tend to be the best at doing that. So there is a question. Hi, I'm Frank. I have a question to another phenomenon that relates to like saying that lots of people weren't like, eager to actually do anything. And now I see a school of social media community management that actually goes into the opposite direction, that doesn't go for actually clarifying or mediating, but they go straight for the punchline. They actually go in there and say, hey, you, you're stupid, fuck up. And they actually kind of have success with that because they get engagement on these comments, they get like secondhand reporting on that. And what do you think about that? I have a strong opinion about it. It's crap. It's really disrespectful. Yeah. I would have used this as an example, but it's nice that you bring it up. Yeah, actually, if you talk about ethical principles like personhood or mutual respect, if you go to your, I think you talk about Facebook, social media managers on Facebook making fun of commenters and so on. Yeah, if you want to do this, this is really destructive. It's shaming of people. It doesn't matter how bad they were. Maybe they had a bad day or whatsoever. They were really awful. But this is your, you have to change the conversation and not put another, yeah, put another, how is it called, heating it up through these things. Yeah, so I would really say this is also instrumentalizing people because you want to make a point, the point of being, I'm sitting here for eight hours and I have enough of you. I will write something really funny now and then please shut up. Yeah, and others will like that. This is also about attracting attention or I don't know, click rates and all of this. And I think it's instrumentalizing because you use that user in the case to make this point and you embarrass him. I don't think that this will be successful at all on the long run. So there are different education we are doing as society at the moment. So we see that there are cases like the government which use a fine sin of humor to interact with these people that works pretty good and it's always eye to eye. It's not getting you down. So this is a good case. If you go in the aggressive kind of getting people down, I don't believe that would work for a longer time because of you create something like a war of words and the weapons get bigger but you don't solve the problem. So I believe we have to educate each other, not only the professionals, the audience too, so that you have self-feeling effects in your community. In the end you see it like telecom huffed. There are guys from the community which are answering to the other guys from the community and the community management just have to have fingers on it. So that are cases where community management is on a higher level and I believe that must be our target to educate all the people in the internet to accept their rules for communication. Yeah, that's a good point. Can I add a gaming thing? There's some more. Oh, sorry. Just a second. I will try to be short. I know I will fail at that. But the point is, I think the thing that you bring up actually raises the point of there having to be consequences for misbehavior. That's the thing that gets praised in these contexts. There's a teeny tiny game called League of Legends that people play online, only just like 60 million of them. It's an incredibly competitive game and that is why it's incredibly toxic. But they employ a whole bunch of psychologists to study why their players are toxic. One of the things they found out is the reason a lot of their players are toxic is not because they're anonymous or anything, it's because there are no consequences for saying the N-word or those kinds of things. And then they sort of messed around with it and ran a whole bunch of ethically questionable experiments on their own user base where they found out if you just show a pop-up window even that says you just used an unacceptable word, then all of a sudden the player gets sort of taken aback and realizes, oh, there actually is a rule here that I was not aware of in the heat of the game. And that way you can educate users, right? But that means you have to take them seriously in the first place and not shoot back or punch back with the same kind of vigor that the infraction was in the first place. Take seriously, things are happening there and that virtual worlds can cause harm to people. I would also add you had Kant on your slides. Was he the inventor of this golden rule? No, no, no, no, the golden rule is like an old-timey and also really shitty thing. But the idea is to take people seriously as people with dignity. And also the idea I think would be do no things that you don't want to be experienced yourself. So I mean this also counts for community managers, I think. So if you don't want to be screamed at by someone or you don't want to be made fun of in public or in public space, you just don't do it. Okay, one last question. The only thing I wanted to say is that talking about communities, we're not only talking about haters and trolls, but there are positive effects as well that we forget. And whenever we communicate as social media managers or something, the communication doesn't end at the screen. There is a person and this person might take this into his real life. So if we are rude to someone, he takes it out. It doesn't end at the computer screen. And we really have to make sure that we don't think of a community as a bunch of people with no names, but of human beings, single human beings who we affect and they affect us as well. There are weeks we go home and we're really pissed off with the community and we really don't want to talk to any of them again. But again, what affects us does affect them. So we can handle this in a positive way by giving positive voices a chance to be heard. So we just click a like on their comments. So it's another kind of interaction, not only regulating hate speech or trolls, but giving those who have a positive opinion a voice by making them visible. And we can do this with a like or with another comment saying, thank you for this comment. It's just a little thing to do, but it can change the way the conversation is being seen. Yeah, I just want to kind of add to that. I've been reading a lot about kind of toxic messages on Facebook and whatnot. And around the community of mummy blogs, parents who blog about raising their children, and some of the very, it's actually a very toxic community where parents like to judge and say very mean things to other mothers about how horrible they're doing their job. And I was reading this one article about this woman who was torn apart in the comment section on her blog and they said that she was a horrible mother and she should have her children taken away. And she was seething and she really wanted to basically lash out. And she slept on it and wrote the next day and kind of wrote a positive message to this woman saying, you know, it sounds like you're doing the best you can do as a mum yourself and I know how hard it is. And she actually responded in kindness to a very toxic response of which the woman who originally wrote the negative comment had a moment of self-reflection and actually apologized on her message saying, oh my God, I'm so sorry, you're raising three children. It can't be easy and I just, ah, I was having a day. And so instead of her like taking that moment and not lashing out, it changed the conversation, it changed the tone and it actually probably strengthened that mummy blog community. So, yes. Yes. Take your time. Yes, absolutely. Don't just respond, don't react, but take your time, think about it, and then write something that's not emotional but give facts, for instance. And also invite people to be part of the conversation. Yeah, we talk too, yeah, barely no times we talk about how we want to build our communication in certain communities. So I think this is our time to have a conversation, but we hope you will continue the conversation in your communities. And let's get ethical. Thank you and bye-bye. Yeah, thank you guys for the very insightful talks and thoughts about how it's speed to be a community manager and all these challenges. Thank you. We'll be back in 15 minutes here on stage six. See you again.
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Racism, sexism, trolling, flaming, griefing and other kinds of toxic behavior seem to dominate headlines about social media and digital games today. From both theoretical and practical perspectives, this 60-minute panel will discuss the crucial role of community management and a communication culture driven by ethics, empathy, dialogue and responsibility when it comes to governing toxic behavior online. After short inputs by each panelist, we will open the floor for questions from the audience.
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10.5446/20632 (DOI)
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So welcome on stage, Ida Tin, co-founder and CEO of Clue, the world's fastest growing female health app. Ida is here with us to illustrate why data will revolutionize global female health. All right, so it's going to be the very analog version, but maybe that's the better one. So I'm Ida Tin, I'm CEO and co-founder of Clue. We are a startup based here in Berlin working on an app called Clue. It's an app to help women track their cycles and understand what's going on in their body. Maybe just two words about why I started thinking about this, which I did in 2009. I had been in relationships since I was 16, so many years. I tried to be on the pill and didn't work very well. I had a lot of side effects. And at some point, I was really like, why is it that nobody has innovated in the space of family planning since the pill came out in the 50s, almost 70 years in the history of technology. That's a very long time. We've put people on the moon since then. And still, women don't know what days they can get pregnant. That made me wonder. And I thought, if I could take information about the body and put it on the phone, that would be the perfect kind of heart of that user experience of accessing that data. So I believe that working on educating women about their bodies is one of the most meaningful problems we can work on. Because it's such a foundational part of human existence, right? Without administration, there would be no humans on the planet. So we know that UN have set up as a millennium goal that all women should have access to information about reproductive health. And they should be able to have the kids they want when they want to. It's a human right to have family planning. However, since these goals were set up in 2005, almost a billion women have had an unwanted pregnancy. So we still have a long way to go. And what I see and what really inspires me right now is that we have this unique combination of computing power, the phone. We have a whole host of sensors giving us data about the body. And we can do this personalized gather collection and give insights to a user on a platform that so many people have now. In fact, there is more women with access to a phone now than access to family planning. So what we can do is that we can inform women through this platform and give her insights that are actionable. And help her understand what's going on so that she can make good choices for herself. They don't give up easily. I like that. Maybe we'll get the last slide. And the point is really to enable women to live full lives and healthy lives together with having this biology that we have that I think many women will experience can set up limitations to what we can do, especially around the world where there is a lot of taboo around this. And what we want to do at Clue is to help women and their partners live full life. And again, just when you can control when you have babies and how many you have, then you can put them to school, you can educate them, you can stay in the workforce. So it's really the foundation of a lot of good development cycles that we want to see globally. So let's see. Right now Clue is, I'll just say a little bit so you have some stats around the product. So we are in 11 languages. It's available on iOS, Android, and the Apple Watch. Period tracking apps is the second biggest category in fitness and health. So if you think it's a niche, it's not a niche at all. It's actually a huge category. We are ranked right now number three in the US health store for period tracking apps. We've raised $10 million from some of the very good investors to make that short. And we are 35 people, very international team, and we've had lots of media all over. So another thing which is really important to mention when we talk about reproductive health and female health is that there's a very big emotional component to this because reproductive health connect to some of the most central areas in our lives, our sexuality, our identity, our families, and also power structures in society. So it's a very, well, it's a central part of life, basically. And we see that people often start tracking data around their health to understand the biology, you know, why do I have these headaches? Am I normal? Am I healthy? But what that keep people engaged over time is the more emotional side of things is that ease of mind of like, ha, now I get it. Now understand what's going on. And I think that is something which is really key to know and understand is that the emotional side of reproductive health and female health is a massive part of living well with our apologies. And reproductive health and female health is a really long journey. It starts with a woman having her first period and then maybe trying not to get pregnant for many years and trying for a baby, maybe having problems getting pregnant. Then you go through a pregnancy, you go through breastfeeding, maybe, and all the way through menopause. And in between, there's a lot of maintenance. People have, 15% of women have PCOS, which is a condition that is related to your cycle. So there's just all this stuff going on. And you never really quite figure out the system because the second you think you've figured it out, something changes, and you still don't really understand how your body works. So it's a huge part of public spending as well. Female health is really its big business. And there are a lot of products around female health, but very few of them are digital. So one of the things that is so fascinating about this time is that now we have a lot of data and we need data so that we can do the predictive analytics we want to do. We can give the insights we want to give and really take this whole part of life and transform it into data points. Not just making it kind of digital, it's not about having a digital calendar, it's about transforming a part of life into data points so that we can analyze them and understand it much better than we did before. So just to give you a sense of scope, so when we look at research right now and we see what studies have been made, some of the two largest studies that was happening over long periods of time had between 650 and 2700 women in them. And the first one tracked 30,000 cycles and the last one tracked 275,000 menstrual cycles. And this is the kind of data that our textbooks is based upon. So when you go to the library, you read a book about female health, this is the kind of scope, this is kind of data that these textbooks were based on. And right now we get literally millions of data points every month. So it's completely new scale. And this is of course very exciting for researchers. And we're working together with Oxford, Howard, Columbia, Stanford, so some of the best researchers in the world because it's a big part of our vision and mission to really help move science forward. And what it does on the consumer side is that it helps us make our predictions more accurate so we can tell a woman better what is about to happen with her body. It makes us able to do smarter health correlations so that we can see how that headache you're suffering from is related to your cycle or that bleeding pattern we can recognize that maybe you have endometriosis. And we can do better preventive care. We can see, oh, it looks like you might have a at risk pregnancy or many other things. On the academic side, of course they can move research way, way faster than they ever were able to before. And on the healthcare provider side, it means that we raise this awareness that every patient is unique. This is a big debate at the moment that most research is carried out on white, young males because they don't have cycles which messes up the results. But of course that's a big problem. So this awareness that every user is really unique or every patient is very important. And we can diagnose much faster which is of course important for the outcome of the treatment. And we can see when symptoms start emerging. So it's people can opt in to be part of this research or they can choose not to have an account and not have the data go anywhere. But many, really most people they say if my anonymized data can help move science forward, I think that's a good thing. And we're very grateful for that. And on that note, I think it's really important to say that we do not sell user data. This is not what we want to live from. We live and die by the trust of our users, right? If you don't want to enter your data into the app, we are out of business. So really having this very clear agreement between the user and us as a company, what do you give, what do you get, is really, really key. And on that note, I think it's very important that companies like mine create a business model that's transparent so that people understand where is my data going. And we do have competitors that actually do sell the data. So it is a relevant conversation to have. And that's not what I want to do, basically. Yeah. So that was the very, very brief, without slides, version of what I wanted to say. I think we should just have a conversation because it's like, yeah, let's do that. So any question, please use the microphone. Patricia, may you all find you got the microphone. There is the first question. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for the clue. It's super useful. You mentioned that one of the benefits of having additional data is that you can improve your sort of predictive algorithms. To what extent is that something you actually want to include in the app? Because on the one hand, academically, and just from a problem point of view, I can see that being incredibly interesting in terms of saying, hey, these symptoms could actually indicate this thing. On the other hand, as a user, as a consumer, suddenly that feels very uncomfortable to me. I feel like, wait, no, I don't want this app to start telling me, hey, you surprised me of this disease. Or, I think then the idea of, wait, okay, who really does have access to this data becomes a much more pressing issue because it's one thing when it's just me putting in random data points. It's another thing when I start to realize those data points are telling a story about me and my health. So just to repeat, so it's optional if you don't want the data to go anywhere, they can stay on your phone with the benefits and disadvantages that that has. So I think one of the key things of building clue is to understand how do you make it just right for the user, right? So that kind of feedback is something that we take very, very seriously and we listen to. And if you don't want the app to tell you that, hey, something looks a little off, maybe you should go see a doctor, the app won't do that. But we do hear that a lot of people, they might walk around with a condition that gives them a lot of discomfort and they don't know. And for these people, it is actually very helpful to have somebody say, you know, maybe you should go talk to a doctor. We won't diagnose because we can't do that. We are not a medically certified app. So that's, you know, that's the line we will not cross. I do appreciate that sense of like, how does it not start feeling it knows too much? And I think that is something that we really have to, you know, it's like when we have an advertisement in our stream that just looks too well, like, you know, targeted, we like get a little uncomfortable. And how do we do that with the body and something that's very, because on the other hand, I mean, my mom got breast cancer, right? It would have been great if somebody had, you know, told her earlier. So it's like, how do you balance these two? It has to be in a, you know, something we two figure out together, basically. Yeah. I think that was a question there. And I guess, oh, actually, I have three questions. That's okay. We have time. Go ahead. Pretty easy to answer, I guess. One, you mentioned 11 countries at the beginning. 11 languages. We are in 190 countries. Okay. Could you, what are the, like, where is it most often used, the app in which countries? So US is our biggest market. Then comes Germany, England, Latin America is big. But yeah, it's very driven by where we do activities to grow the app. Because my idea was in terms of countries where access to healthcare is a bit more difficult than in first world countries, might be even more helpful. Absolutely. It ties in a bit to the second question, I guess, goes into your direction as well. Could you tell us a bit more about the diagnostics part? Because for me, it's a bit hard to imagine how it actually works at the moment. Does it really give, like, active tips? Please think about that. Think about this. So just give it a better feel. I'll take the number two question first. So I don't feel my job is done until everybody on this planet can understand what's going on. And so there is a big challenge. So how do you get to people that might have, so we did, we just did three weeks of research in South Africa, for instance, and people in low income communities, they actually do have even smartphones, but they don't have a data plan, like they can't afford to send and receive SMS. So we are working on developing potentially something which is more conversational UI model, so more like a bot, that we can, so they can use the service without having to transport a lot of data. And I think there's a huge opportunity of actually getting to people that have phones, even if they're not connected. So I think it's, you know, we can really get to hundreds of millions of women. We really can. And about the diagnostics, so we are still early. I mean, we can, is it this thing clicking? We can do some things, and we have a lot that we do kind of under the hood that is not in the product yet. So I think one of the first things that people will see in the product is recognizing endometriosis and PCOS, which are two very common diseases or conditions, actually. Very last question. About the business model, because you said you don't want to sell user data, could you say one or two sentences about that? How does it work at the moment? I mean, you said you could get like a 10 million dollars of funding, but... Yeah. So it's been a strategic choice not to try and monetize yet, because we believe that the biggest opportunity is to have a lot of users, and then we can figure out what to do. But we have many ideas, and I think the first very simple premium feature will be optimizing the app for natural family planning to make it really helpful. You can do it now, but we can do better and more. And that is something that I think some people will want to pay a little bit for. Thank you. You're welcome. So next question. I think you had a question. Here's the first row. Patricia? I think it was almost the same that he asked, but maybe you can give some concrete figures about the numbers of how many women in Africa or in third world countries use the app? So I don't have them on top of my head. And again, I would say that a lot of our growth is guided by where we do most activities. I mean, just an example, we had a YouTuber talk about Clue in Saudi Arabia, and we saw a huge spike. So I think I actually have been surprised at how well the app seems to translate culturally across the world. Because we, you know, build it for America and Europe, and kind of that's the design language it has. But I think it's, you know, a woman in the Philippines or a woman in India or a woman in South Africa, they'll, you know, they'll have good value from using the app as it is right now. I don't have an exact figure on how many people in Africa, but we have not, you know, we don't, we think that a bot is maybe a better product fit for Africa right now. So we haven't pushed the product that we have because we don't think that's the right fit yet. But one thing which is really important to say is that the data we can collect here and the intelligence that we can build around understanding the data here, we can feed into much simpler platforms. So when we process data that is generated here on the app and all, you know, where you can enter a lot of different data, it's like a rich data set, we can understand things and we can take that understanding and feed it back to a user who's on a much simpler platform so that everybody benefits from what we learn even if they don't have the full experience. Maybe I missed it, but how many users do we have in total all over the world? We have more than four million active users right now. Thank you. Wow. Another question, we have still two minutes. Oh, yes. Ladies first. Just a very short question. Does it work on BlackBerry? Like me being from South Africa, the most phone used is BlackBerry. No, it doesn't. Sorry. Next feature. There was a question here. A very short question as well. Can you tell us something about sensors that are being used for tracking? And what do you think about that? Yeah, something we think a lot about. I actually originally started out this whole thing thinking about sensors, so something I'm very interested in. And we keep looking into everything we can find to see, you know, what is being developed. There are different versions of temperature, which is helpful, but I really think the world is ready for the next leap generation. I think hard rate could be a very interesting one because it's so easy to get. We're doing research to look at Fitbit right now because it's basically the same thing you can see on the body that the hard rate goes up a little bit after you ovulate, when you ovulate and after. But I think the real challenge is figuring out something that can tell us five days before we ovulate that we are about to ovulate. And to do that, we kind of, right now, you have to look at the molecular level, and that is still challenging in a home diagnostic way. But it's coming. And I think what we are getting better at is taking lots of different kind of noisy data streams and making sense of it. So I think in my mind, I've gone from thinking that it's very much like a sensor play to thinking it's much more data play. It's much more taking all the passive streams that we have. But if somebody comes up with like the perfect sensor that gets us to the right data points, you know, I'll love it. I hope I'll be in a position to partner with them. That would be a dream scenario. And actually on that note, I want to say one last thing maybe is that I really think and hope and want to get to a point where we can develop a contraceptive, which is not based on hormones. And we're not there yet. As I said, you can use national family planning and it's okay, but I don't think it's a mass kind of solution to a mass problem. So, you know, we keep pushing for that, but I'm very excited about that, you know, it will come. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. And maybe I want to say that we are building a feature for the partner or partners or perfect, you know, moms and dads. So keep looking. It'll come soon. And I don't have a blackberry, so I might use it. Okay.
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Ida Tin, CEO and co-founder of Clue, the world’s fastest growing period tracking and fertility app will talk about how we can use data to fill the gaps in the vastly under-researched field of female health and reproductive health.
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10.5446/20637 (DOI)
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Good morning everybody. Thanks for waking up early and thanks for being here and the interest in my talk. I'm Peter. I work at the Stiftung neue Verantwortung, non-party charitable independent think tank in Berlin. Since we have a lot to talk about and I really want to talk with you about many different issues. Talk to me later if you're interested in what we're doing at the Foundation or work and what I do for a living. To start with the topic before the presentation is up. If you think about the online services that Rika just told us about, so Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever you can think of. They obviously play an important role in our daily lives. So imagine how you would communicate through the three days of Republica without any of those services. Some of you may do that because they're comfortable not using the service, but for a huge part of us, these services play a central part in our lives. So for me, it was interesting to look at what are the rules of the game for law enforcement to access the data of these services. Because obviously, since they are central part of our lives, they play a central part often in crimes. And there may be relevant data in Facebook's private messages or Twitter messages or Instagram pictures that are relevant for an investigation. But at the same time, we have an international dimension because these are services that are hosted outside of Europe, outside of Germany. So why is that important? Well, as I told you, since they play such a central role, if the rules of the game are outdated, there may be human rights violations. So for example, if there's a lack of transparency, how law enforcement may access this data, or if they are not accountable to what they are doing. So up-to-date, as with every other aspect of the internet, up-to-date rules and up-to-date laws that really focus on the central issues are extremely relevant. Another issue is that the US is aware of this problem that we are working with outdated legal frameworks and outdated rules, so to speak. And they are updating these right at the moment. It's of course a long process. It's not like after the Republic, everything is done and set. But the striking thing for me is that they are deciding rules for the rest of the world because it's essentially how foreign law enforcement agencies may access data that is stored in the US. And they are doing it for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is sadly silent. So they have very little engagement, very little knowledge about this issue. And certainly, even if you think that, well, if it's outdated for law enforcement, that's a good thing because that means law enforcement doesn't use it and they don't get access to our data so easily, well, you're mistaken. Because what happens is if they are not using these legal frameworks, they try other mechanisms. So you see a lot of data localization. So that Brazil says to Facebook, if you want to do this business in our country, you have to store the data inside our country. Another aspect is the extraterritorial reach of laws. And I know it's early, you perhaps didn't have your first club, Marti, yet. I had a little bit too much. So extraterritorial reach of laws may sound a bit complicated than it is, but it basically means that the US says we don't care where the server is as long as the company is headquartered in the US, we have access to the server. It doesn't matter if it's in Ireland or Singapore or Croatia, we have access to it. And that means that you have a law that before was only relevant in your own jurisdiction, and suddenly you say, well, it's basically legal all over the world. So I jumped ahead and I talked already about the bad implications and why it's relevant, but what the heck are we actually talking about? Well, the wonderful name is mutual legal assistance process. I like the word, you may not like it, but hopefully in the next 20 minutes you will understand that it's a very important phrase, a very important word. And basically it just means that there might be international crime. So someone from country A did a crime in country B and country B investigates and needs the help of country A to find this thief or whatever. And this is old, this is nothing new to the internet. There have been international dimensions to crimes since hundreds of, or even thousands of years ago. The tricky thing is that these mutual legal assistance processes or treaties are just as old as this, decades old. And they were written with a mindset that didn't think about a global network that reaches every corner of the earth and could directly connect everybody. So I told you it's a wonderful word and it's as long as the word is, as long as this entire process. So we start from the left and go all the way to the right and then we are at the right and we go all the way back to the left. I could take the next 10 minutes to explain the process, but I think since it's not even 11am and I really want you to understand the issue, I think it's better not to use this visualization but the most beautiful visualization I could think of and that's you. So let's do a game. You are all, the audience is all Germany. And here at my stage, and the yes. And there's a crime. So I need a valaine. Who wants to be a thief or robber? You don't need to do anything, you don't need to stand up, you just need to raise your hand. Who wants to be perfect? You are there, you are valaine. Awesome. What did you do? You stole, I already thought of it, so don't worry. You stole this nice car downstairs. Did you see this nice car? This silver one? It looks awesome. He stole it. Sorry. So who wants to be a police officer? You are there. Awesome. Police officer. So you are a German police officer and you saw that he was bragging about stealing this car, which was stupid that he bragged about it on Twitter. So you have a lead, you have a Twitter account and you want to look into this Twitter account. Who wants to be perhaps for the first time in his or her life a judge? A German judge. You are there with a yellow scarf. Awesome. You are the judge. So we need one more person and that's the Ministry of Justice. So you are all people, but one of you can be an entire ministry. Who wants to be a ministry? You are there. Awesome. So Ministry of Justice, Judge Thief and police officer. You are all German. That's the US. Don't come here. That's the US. So you stole the car, you are investigating and suddenly there is an international dimension to this crime because there may be proof on Twitter that he actually stole the car and that he was perhaps not acting alone, but there was a gang of car dealers, whom I'd imagine. So you go to our wonderful judge and say, well, here's proof that I have enough evidence to access this kind of data. She writes a court order and she goes to the Ministry of Justice and says, well, we need the help of the yes to solve this crime. And the Ministry of Justice says, well, I have a very nice process for this. It's called mutual legal assistance process. It's very quick. So the Ministry of Justice goes to me to the yes. I'm multiple parts here. So goes to the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Justice to the yes, I get the thing. She translated it because I don't speak German. I only speak English. And I get this court order. And then I give it to the US attorney in California because Twitter sits in California. And then the US attorney in California gives it to the court, to the district court in California of the district where the Twitter headquarters sits. And then it goes to the FBI and every single stage this court order is analyzed. If it's correct, if it's specific enough, and so on. And then in the last instant, the FBI hands over the court order to the company, to Twitter. And then all the way back. So the company produces the data, gives it to the FBI. The FBI minimizes the data and sees if it's relevant. Then it has, it's at the district court, then at the US attorney of California, then at the Department of Justice, and now comes your time, I hand it back to you. You hand it back to her. She hands it back to him. And he has this data. It was really quick, right? It was, it was like painless. What do you think? How long does this process take? What? One year. One year, you're very close, very good guess. On average, it takes 10 months. So next time we meet at this stage, perhaps I can give you the data. It doesn't really, if you think about Berlin startups sometimes don't last for 10 months. So it seems like a really antiquated process. And what's the problem? Well, it's a slow process based on really old treaties. The second thing is, it's, there's, so basically there's no definition outside of the yes of what a probable cause is. And you need probable cause. It's a legal definition to access data, to access content. And this is a problem to the point that even the Council of the European Union wrote extensively about this issue that there is no concept of probable cause inside the EU. And it's a very, it's a very big struggle for European courts or for German courts, for German judges to, to, to agree to this probable cause. Third thing, it's a black box. So once you started this process and you hand over the data, you don't really know where it stuck. So in the last two years, there was a lot of investigation, a lot of questioning and interviews. And we found out that one of the central issues is this probable cause, that the Department of Justice has to constantly go back to the foreign judge and say, well, it's, it's not enough. You don't have enough proof to reach this probable cause. So we need more proof. And then the judge goes back to the, to our wonderful police officer and he has to provide more proof. And that, that takes a long time. And of course, since a lot of companies are sitting in, in California, the district courts are actually over, have too much to do with all the requests because all the companies are sitting in, in this area. And lastly, because of all the, all the four points, it's obvious that it doesn't scale in there, in the edge of the internet, in the edge of the cloud, where we use these kind of services on a, on a daily basis. This process doesn't work. So the question that civil society and especially US civil society and US companies asked over the last, I would say two years, academics fall, fall a lot longer. How can we fix the process? How, how can we make it scale so that in the long run, it's useful again, the cops are not trying to circumvent it, national governments don't try to circumvent it with data localization and what I told you before, the extraterritorial reach of laws. And one of the most concrete proposals, how to fix this, is called the Dascal Woods proposal. It's very simple. It's a Jennifer Dascal, a US law professor and Andrew Woods, another US law professor. And what they basically do is they say, well, if your country has a minimum set of, of human rights, then we skip the entire US court, US department of justice, US attorney part of the, of the game. And the foreign court, so our foreign judge over there, can directly access the, the request the company in the US and ask for, for data. This, this speeds up the process, absolutely. At the same time, we get rid of, of probable cause. So they try to make the minimum human rights standard as high as possible so that you don't need probable cause anymore. And at the same time, since I told you these old treaties, they are really intransparent, unaccountable. They try to fix that too. So to make mandatory reporting by governments, how many requests they did per year, how successful they were, for which types of, types of crime and so on. But it's, it's not a silver bullet because if you think about this, this takes a long time, but it's actually a lot of eyes that look on the specific court order and decide if it's enough to provide the data or not. And if you get rid of all of that, there's not, not much left. So it's streamlined, it certainly streamlines the process, but it's not by, by a far shot, not a silver bullet. Because if you, if you think about it, how do you agree transnationally on minimum human rights standards? So there might be countries that have very good standards for, for child abuse, but they have very poor human rights protection for thievery or robbery or money laundering or whatever. So suddenly you have to think about, well, it's not one universal human rights, minimum human rights standard, but you actually have to think in terms of categories of crime. And then you end up with a weird matrix where you say, well, it's okay to work with this country as long as it's not thievery or religious free speech. And if it's okay to work with this country, if it's child abuse, but nothing else. And it's, it's really complicated. And again, just what I told you before, the probable cause is really tricky, but it's a really high standard. So it's actually a very good protection for our content. So with that proposal, it has been, it came up like middle of last year, it has been discussed amongst mainly US civil society, US Department of Justice, there was a Senate hearing in the US that talked about this, this issue. So the US is slowly picking up on the issue and they slowly understand all the dimensions, but the problem is they're talking amongst themselves. They're talking with other US companies, with other US civil societies to decide what would be best for the rest of the world. And that doesn't sound like the right process, but you can only partly blame them because especially European civil society is fairly silent. There was a few months, a few weeks ago, there was a conference call and a meeting in the UK where Privacy International was involved in other organizations, but that was, that was a very small share of the European NGOs, not to speak of international, so not EU NGOs for whom this would be really relevant. So yes, there might be a lot of problems and there might be a lot of obstacles to take and we should be very careful to get rid of probable cause and we should be very careful to decide what is the minimum human rights standard to access our data that is stored in the US by a US company. But at the same time, we have the chance to really improve the process because if we get it right, if we involve more non-US civil society NGOs, if we involve more academics that are not US, then we really have the chance to make it faster and more responsive so that the police actually has to use it and cannot, the governments cannot circumvent it by saying, well, the process is broken, we have to do data localization or we have to apply our laws extra territorially. We can make it transparent and accountable. As I said there in the DASCALWOOD proposal, there's also the mentioning of sanctions, of independent audits, if you comply with a proposal. And essentially it's, if you think about it, why in our scenario where he stole the car and the German police officer investigated, why should we play by US law if it's a crime completely inside Germany or completely outside of the US? So suddenly just because he stored the picture on Twitter, suddenly we have to agree to US law and that doesn't make sense. Even if it's a good law and for other countries, it might better protect the human rights than their own standards. For a lot of countries, it doesn't make sense. So in my opinion, it's better to come up with international standards, minimum human rights protection, or the best human rights protection we can think of and have a really international approach instead of just playing by the rules the US decides. With that, I come to a full turn and if you think about our wonderful police officer who waited for 10 months desperately hoping to get this evidence to find the real responsible guy, the lines from Adele's song, hello from the other side, I must have called a thousand times, suddenly seemed very fitting. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions? Awesome. Any questions? Yeah. Thank you. Your talk was really interesting to me. I have just one question about the lack of definition of probable cause because you said it's a mutual agreement and I would guess that this indicates that when some US authorities come to a German company, to a German court, they have to apply a legal standard as well. How can it be then that there is no definition in Germany or what do the German courts apply then? I'm actually no legal expert. I'm information scientist and communication theory. But what I understood from the talks with US lawyers and with European lawyers and again what the Council of the European Union wrote in their reports, of course they understand what probable cause means but it's sometimes hard to quickly adapt this concept to a German case or to a Italian case or to basically to a case outside of the US because for every case, you might need different evidence and the threshold of probable cause might be proven in a different way. You understand what I mean? Thank you. One more question. Would it be fair to say that human rights are never going to top economical interests? To get this through, human rights would have to be more important than economic interests like US interests. Well, that's the thing. I don't think there is a lot of economic interest because what happens in the mutual legal assistance process is that you ask another country for help in an investigation and you don't compensate them for this. So actually the US has an incentive to update and streamline this process because at the moment this old process just creates a lot of costs. But the tricky part is if we don't have a voice in this, they will streamline it just out of efficiency in an economic way but we have a chance to streamline it and at the same time make it more countable and have a strong human rights protection in there. But it will only happen if we find a voice, if we engage the US parts. I think there was maybe one last question over there. It's okay. Okay. So thank you, Jan Peter Klein Hans for this very insightful talk. I hope all of us now know what's about mutual legal assistance processes. Awesome. Thank you very much. Give a warm applause.
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How law enforcement agencies (LEA) get access to user data from service providers like Google, Facebook or Microsoft is poorly regulated. Established legal frameworks (Mutual Legal Assistance) are severely outdated and do not adequately protect our human rights. LEA investigations in the cloud are a messy business and currently dominated by pragmatism rather than the rule of law. The talk will highlight issues of the current practices and give an overview over the international reform debate.
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10.5446/20638 (DOI)
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Thank you everybody. It's my pleasure to be here with you all at Republica. I first want to ask, I'm from Autodesk. Has anyone heard of Autodesk? I just love a show of hands. Any of you use our tools? I'm just sort of curious. We make software tools, if I can click here. Clicker? Clicker. There we go. Sorry. We make software tools for people who make things. Our customers are the designers, the engineers, the architects, and the digital designers who make much of the world around us. Skyscrapers, buildings, ships, bridges, cars, machinery, film, and games. Including some of the most advanced things that you see on the planet, and even stories about worlds beyond. It's my pleasure to talk to you today about tools, our relationship with tools, and the shape of things to come. For the past three and a half million years, we humans have made our tools and used them to make much of the world around us. At the same time, those tools and the things that we've created with them have also shaped us. This is the first tool made by human hands. And this is the human hand that was shaped by that stone handaxe. We've always had this intimate interplay between our tools and ourselves. Yes, we created the spear, but the spear also created in us a brain that gave us better eye-hand coordination and also an ability to think strategically enough to form hunting parties. As we've co-evolved with our tools, they have shaped our bodies, but they've also shaped our thoughts and our behaviors. We started with simple machines using knobs and levers as well as, sorry, knobs and levers as well as wheels to stack stones on top of each other, which gave us the power to imagine our first types of buildings like the pyramids. And then eventually, we produced mass-produced steel as well as rivets, elevators, cranes, even the drafting table. And these new tools help us reimagine what buildings could be, giving us the first skyscrapers. And from there, we made buildings that twist to the sky, even buildings that go to the sky and then come back. But there's two sides to every tool. Initially, tools gave us new capabilities, but ultimately they constrained our thinking. You see, the same drafting tools that once gave us those first skyscrapers also gave us cars that looked like this, boxy and boring. But do you remember when cars around us all just sort of melted? This was triggered by a new tool, new software that was able to model complex curves, came online all at once, and it gave designers the power to have an expression in a totally new design language. Do you remember when this meant communication? Back then, our thoughts and our conversations were literally tethered to the wall. But now, in that same hand that once held the simple stone handaxe, we hold this, a passageway to the most powerful tool that we've ever created, the digital world. And today, because of profound changes in this digital world, we're at another one of those moments where the capabilities of new tools are giving us the power to imagine, design, and create things that we never could before. In this digital world that we've created, we're working in the realm of bits now, free from the constraints of atoms, free of the laws of the physical world. As we create apps and programs and services in this parallel world, we're enjoying all of its flexibility and freedom. We're literally building castles in the sky. Think about the words that we use to describe this other place. Cyber space, upload, and the cloud. But for all the activity that's going on up there, that's not actually the big news. Because I'm here to tell you today that that other world, that parallel digital world, is about to come crashing down around us. Maybe I'll do just this. My clicker is misbehaving. It's going to come crashing down around us and make manifest in the physical world around us. Now, there's been some early strikes already. And we see that wherever the digital world touches the physical world, it affects it and changes it in a very profound way. Think about how it dematerialized the entire entertainment industry and electrified the hospitality industry. How it's all but vaporized the taxi industry. Wherever something becomes computable, it also becomes infinitely mutable. We're going to start seeing more digitization striking the world. And we're going to move from building things to compiling things. Digitization is going to transform our expectations for the entire physical world and how we design for it. It's going to change each of the things in the world, but only once we change our relationship with the tools that we use to build it. Just like that stone handaxe, the computer mouse has both expanded but also limited our capabilities and our imaginations. You see, we've always been sort of stifled and limited by this need to push our ideas through our fingertips and into our digital tools. In fact, up until now, if you couldn't draw it, you couldn't fully imagine it. And you certainly couldn't build it in the real world. We can't allow our creative imaginations to be limited in this way anymore. The fact is, we're going to have to let go of our tools. And the good news is, today we can. There's a new technology called generative design. And with this approach, we can tell the computer what it is that we want to achieve instead of drawing for it what we already know. Let me give you an example. Say I want to design something fun like the body for this quadcopter drone. Now, I know it has to be light enough to support its own weight and maybe carry a small payload like a camera or something. Generative design meets me at those goals and uses algorithms to automatically synthesize geometry using just those goals and constraints as input. Generative... Once I've given the computer those goals, I can step back and I can let it explore the entire solution space on its own, creating millions of options that all meet my goals and my criteria, including ones that I never would have come up with, all in a time that it would have taken me to draw just one. By the way, there's a reason why the drone body that the computer created looks a lot like the body of a flying squirrel. It's because the algorithms are designed to work in the same way that our bones operate or the way that nature and evolution work. This is the first time that we have the infinite expressibility of nature available to us. For the first time outside of nature, form truly follows function. We recently used this technology on a project with Airbus to explore the airplane of the future. Now, it's still going to be a few years until something like this plane is flying, but we've already started. We made progress by using generative design to redesign one of the components inside of the aircraft, this partition panel shown here in pink. Look what it designed. A new, generatively designed, 3D printed partition that's stronger than the one that flies today in the plane and yet only weighs half as much. This new bionic partition will fly in an A320 later this year. So what about creating the things that we design? You know, robots aren't anything new. They've been around for decades, and their physical capabilities haven't really changed very much. What has changed is that lately we've been going beyond the repetitive tasks that we've given to robots, and we're exploring new ways of communicating and collaborating together with them. We're expanding their capabilities by connecting them up to generative design and giving them the ability to do additive manufacturing. Now, this gives them a capability that they've never had before. And to explore that kind of space, we teamed up with our friend and artist, Joris Larmann, and his team at MX3D. Together, we're going to generatively design and robotically print the world's first autonomously manufactured bridge. This bridge was designed by an algorithm guided by Joris, and this summer we'll hit print, and the robots will begin building it across the canal all by themselves. Okay, I talked about computers and robots, about thinking and acting in the world. How are computers going to perceive the world? The Internet of Things is a nervous system for the things that we create. Our bodies have a nervous system that tells us what's going on all around us, but the things we create don't yet have a nervous system, so they have no idea what's going on around them. What if they did have a nervous system? If the things that we create could actually sense what was going on, they could improve themselves over time. And to think more about that theory, we teamed up with these stunt drivers, guys who make race cars for a living down in LA called the Bandito Brothers. We took their love for building record-breaking cars and helped them install a nervous system into one of those cars, taking a race car and instrumenting it with dozens of sensors. And then we put a world-class driver behind the wheel, and we pushed the car to its limits out in the desert. Using its new nervous system, the car recorded everything that was happening to it, all the forces that it was subjected to. And then we brought all that real-world data, billions of data points, we brought it back and put it into our generative design tool and look what it created. It designed a bespoke chassis for that driver and those conditions on that track. It's impossible for humans to do this kind of work alone, and yet humans are capable of this when augmented by generative design, advanced robotics, and a digital nervous system. So these technologies are already shaping our physical world. I want to talk to you now about another technology that's going to act as an accelerant across all of them, machine learning. Sixty years ago, a clever programmer taught a machine how to beat you at tic-tac-toe. Now, we all know that computers have gotten a lot smarter since then, and in 1997, the smartest of them, Deep Blue, beat Gary Kasparov at chess. But that was still just a display of brute force computation power. It wasn't until 2011 that things got really interesting. Rather than working from predefined recipes, Watson had to use reasoning to beat his human opponents at Jeopardy. And then just a couple of weeks ago, AlphaGo beat the best human player at Go. A game so complex, it has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. In order to defeat his opponent, AlphaGo had to develop a sort of intuition about the game. In fact, at one point, its programmers didn't really fully understand exactly why it was doing what it was doing. Let's step back for a moment and take a look at the time frame underneath these milestones. You can see that there's something exponential going on here. It's very exciting. In less than one human lifetime, computers have been going from playing a simple child's game to mastering a game respected as the pinnacle of strategic thinking. There's two things responsible for this acceleration. First, unprecedented degrees of parallelism due to GPUs, multicore, and the cloud. And the second is that we've actually taught computers to teach themselves. Let me give you an example of this. Think about the classic Atari video game, Breakout. Now, how did you learn how to play Breakout? Probably spending many long afternoons out of the sun trying to hone your strategy. Let me tell you how a computer learned to play at Breakout. Told only to maximize the score up on top, and it could twist this knob, a computer learned to play Breakout, better than any human ever had in just one night. How did it do that? Like this. It played in computer time, playing millions of games in the course of the night, which meant it could learn faster on its own than we could ever teach it. Compare that to how we share what we know. Compare that to what we're doing here at this conference today. Just because one of us is good at a skill doesn't mean we can make our neighbor good at that same skill. But once one machine masters Breakout or any skill, it could transmit it and share it perfectly with all the other machines. They all master the skill forever. When computers get better at learning, it's going to benefit and accelerate generative design because they're going to be able to notice our reactions to what it is that they propose and be able to incorporate our unspoken preferences into the design process. AI is also going to give robots the ability to independently complete their tasks without dependence on us for explicit instructions. And for the Internet of Things, AI is going to use that input from the new digital nervous system, not just to sense the world, but to react intelligently to it. I talked about computers getting smarter. Let's talk about them getting more creative. As powerful as computers have become, you know, we've only ever used them for that logical left brain kind of stuff. In fact, even when a sculptor or an artist or a writer is using a creative tool, the creativity is only ever coming the inspiration from our side of the screen. But now I think computers are really poised to transcend that barrier and make the journey into the realm of human creativity in a way that goes back all the way to Plato's theory of forms. Plato said that there are two realities, two distinct realms, the realm of the physical, which contains real concrete objects, and the realm of the abstract, which contains forms or ideal versions of those objects. You know, we could talk about this chair and that chair, but to Plato, they're really just different representations of one true ideal chair. Computers are actually now starting to think this way. They're becoming able to grasp the fundamental essence of a thing. Once they understand the fundamental essence of a thing like a chair, they're going to be able to help us design better, because we're going to have a shared bridge of meaning between the designer and the tool. Fluency of meaning, an ability to grasp the unembodied, assimilate the unexpressed, to distill the fundamental essence of a thing. That is what is going to make computers better creative partners. And when I say creative, I mean exactly that. I mean to include the creative arts. We saw how one computer went to video game school overnight. I don't think it's unrealistic to believe that a computer could also go to art school overnight. In fact, here's one that did. It studied Rembrandt, and then it painted a brand new one. So, board games, video games, even painting. Computers are getting better at human style capabilities. Intuition, generating hunches, even making creative leaps. Another way to put it is to say that computers have always been like Mr. Spock, but today they're becoming a lot more like Captain Kirk. Spock is logical and brilliant, but as we saw countless times on Star Trek, that was almost never enough to really save the day. In fact, it was usually Captain Kirk who came up with the ultimate solution to whatever problem they were facing, and it was usually driven by hunch, intuition, and creativity. We're going to need that kind of unbridled imagination to address today's biggest challenges. Fortunately for us, computers are starting to develop human style capabilities to augment our own. So, what's it going to be like when computers can generate fresh insights on their own, make independent creative leaps, just like we do? I think it's going to fundamentally change our relationship with tools and the design process. In the past, and for millions of years actually, humans have taken the role of operator with our tools, telling them exactly what to do and expecting them to do just that and no more. With things like generative design, the role of the designer becomes much more like curator, allowing the generative process in the computer to suggest ideas, and then we judge their suitability. But going forward, I think we're going to be more like mentors to our tools, coaching them, and providing them with experiences. Think about how any creative professional, really any of you in the room, how you seek out constant stream of new, challenging, different experiences as a means of continually growing, or how any parent or teacher does the same for his child or her students. In that same way, I think we're going to have to do that kind of mentoring for our increasingly intelligent and creative computers. I said at the beginning of the talk that we humans have shaped the world. Moving forward, I think we're going to shape the things that shape the world. The question is, what then will they create? The world in large part has always been made by our tools, but it's always been made in the shape of our values. The tools that I showed you are going to give us infinite expressability. The real question is, what values do we want to see expressed in the world? For me, I think we need to be considering values like going from constructing things to growing them, from fabricating things to farming them, shifting our focus from craving obedience from our tools to valuing and encouraging their autonomy. We'll move away from a policy of extraction to embrace aggregation, and we'll shift from creating things that are disconnected and isolated to creating things that are inherently connected and interrelated. I think we leave behind strict rigidity and embrace and encourage fluidity. These are the values, the qualities that we need to instill in our tools if we expect them to become our creative partners in the future. And when I think about them, and I think about the future, I think I know what the future might look like. The shape of things to come will be an expression of our values, our imaginations, and our humanity. The shape of things to come looks a lot like who we are. Thank you very much. So if there's any questions, just raise your hand and I come over all the guys with a green t-shirt who will be there. So thank you for your talk. Since you're in Germany, the land and the country of Adorno and Horkheimer and the dialectic of enlightenment, can you hear me? No, I'm sorry. I'll try again. Since you're in Berlin and in Germany where Adorno and Horkheimer and critical theories were very important and talked about the dialectic of enlightenment, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that concept. I repeat it for me. I'm having a really hard time. The dialectic of enlightenment. Dialectic of? Enlightenment. Enlightenment. Okay, yes. So that mankind created technology and the enlightenment thinking of the positive side of technology. Yes. But the flip side of that is the negativity of technology. Right. And your talk is very optimistic. Yes. And goes counter to this thinking about the dialectic of enlightenment. So I'd like you to speculate, not just speculate, but think through the negativity of what you've just presented and the way you talk about nervous systems when you're talking about sensors that also ingest data. So you've used this humanistic model of the body which you've applied to technology. Okay. But I think you're sort of pushing out the negativity that Adorno and Horkheimer talk about. So could you please say a little bit about the negative side of your wonderful shape of things to come? Sure. I do that on purpose. And the reason I do that is because I think that in effect the stories we tell will those stories into existence. And I believe that fairly profoundly. So you know very well that the reason we all have cell phones in our hand is literally because of Star Trek. Because on Star Trek, Captain Kirk was able to call the enterprise from his hand before we had any such technology. When that technology actually started to cohere and when it actually started to materialize, we already knew what to do with it and we welcomed it to be true. I think that the stories that we tell have a power to manifest themselves in the careers that we pursue and the things that we put on the planet. I think that the stories that we have today about the killer virus, the zombies that are eating cities, the apocalypse that's upon us, I think they actually create that potentiality and I think that they precondition us to welcome those sorts of realities. I therefore believe that it's the job of technology and the job of technologists like me to hurry up and get the alternative reality implemented as quickly as possible so we don't fall into those negative dystopias. Any more questions please raise your hands. No. Oh, over there. So thanks you. Thank you for your talk. During your talk you asked us to be mentors and I'm thinking in our society mentors are people of respect or training and now through technology we can be maybe all can be mentors. Is there a guideline you can give us? I think at the end the if I'm understanding your question can and how should we all be mentors, is that part of it? I tried to address that towards the end of the talk where I said that with increasingly powerful tools it's important that we actually consider which values we deploy as mentors into the tools. The interesting thing that I find is that we're going to have tools that we no longer learn or have to learn in order to use them. We're soon going to start finding tools that instead learn us and so what it is that we model and how we behave for them is going to be amplified into the world. So I think in some ways it maybe encourages us all to grow up a little and actually to behave as we want to see manifest in the world. Over there is there the green guy is coming. I was wondering when you talked about the Rembrandt computer that that's still kind of I don't want to belittle that approach or improvement but I thought that still it was a copy of something that already existed and I'm not quite sure if that leap from something kids play and then really strategic games for the smartest amongst us that that leap towards creating something original and new. I don't know if that's really just a matter of time but you make it seem so so logical that that's just the one direction it will go and it will come for certain. What makes you think that? Could you I'm sorry could you just say a couple more words what makes me think? Yeah well why do you assume that that leap is a leap that will come because I think that's really what this whole debate is all about also when the other guy talked about the mentor and about being that being a really optimistic kind of image. Yes it's it seems to me like it's like a happy end don't be afraid it will be something good because being a mentor is really something really grown up and something to like but I don't know if that's really just you know let's let's just wait for a couple of years and then we'll all be mentors it's not automatically so what makes you think that this will happen as you told us? I see. I think we need it and the reason why is because as designers today the constraints that we're operating under aren't the real constraints of a problem when I look around and I get to meet many designers when I ask them what are the constraints around their problem it really turns out to be time money and patience right so it's the boss coming in and saying is your design done yet is it in budget right it's all due on Friday and that is not at all the real parameter of the actual design conversation but what we're pondering is what if we actually had a real design partner with us that could explore many more options than we could and it could go off and it could generate all the answers to a problem what relationship would we then have with it it means that as a designer we wouldn't be left to be drawing things we wouldn't be left even to be coming up with solutions we'd be left with properly identifying the problem and we'd have the conversation about what are the real goals what are the real constraints and I think that's the reason that designers go into design in the first place in large part and secondly given the things that we have on the planet most of which are the alpha or beta of the real building we wanted to make or the real bridge that we want to make I'd really rather understand the full consequences of our actions before we put them on the planet I'm not sure that the computers would need us then still so why would they take a girl like me who doesn't have time and the budget to learn from why would I be a mentor then I think that it would be interesting to find a problem that you want to solve and call some of this capacity and into apply to it I think you're you're driven by some passion you're driven by something you want to change and what I'm trying to convey is we now have the tools to do that kind of thing and to explore more deeply and more broadly than we ever have before it makes you more powerful Hi I will take a leap into the futuristic vision and any plans of Autodesk to take over the space industry with generative design as this will be highly demanded there I'm I'm I have a very hard time hearing I'm sorry I could is there a oh here we go futuristic maybe I could just can I read it all right that's not what I said yeah so let me try to repeat it is there any plans for Autodesk to tackle space industry with generative design where it will be yes highly demanding yeah the space industry yes absolutely so one of the things that's most interesting about generative design it can make parts components assemblies that actually perform extraordinarily well in strength versus weight which is critical for the space industry we're likely to and we have partners that we support already that are exploiting space that are going to the moon for example our partners moon express will be landing on the moon later next year we're helping them to design parts that go on that lander in terms of actually like going to space ourselves for purpose of you know asteroid mining or space exploration our company alone does not have an interest in doing that we want to support our customers who are passionate about that industry though I do have a little more for a technical question for you okay can you hear me yes I can very good regarding the drone optimization problem that you showed in janitor design from a mathematical standpoint when I look at a 2d optimization problem and I start at the same point I will normally end up at the same local maximum or minimum whatever it is so how did you come up mathematically with the different design solutions that you showed yes so did you change the parameters from the start a starting point or more the the goal that you had in mind what did you do right so it does what first is to say that it does a design exploration to make sure that it's not going into a local minimum right it there may very well be a global minimum somewhere else so it has to stochastically explore to answer your question sort of mathematically but an even better answer is that it's generating answers for parameters that I have not explicitly stated so material for example or cost or manufacturability or even kind of manufacture these examples that I was showing typically had been 3d printed but there's no reason generative design can't be used for injection molding or for casting or for milling or for other traditional techniques so what's important to know is that all of those different kinds of techniques can still be explored without having to set them first the way we do in today's design process the question was some of those manufacturing processes had inherent boundaries in them that we have to repeat it if you want go ahead so the casting whatever molding you said those are actually things that we invented for ourselves that's right and so the machine knows that that it has these things to its or in its equipment yes but how can it actually find new solutions for that too new new solutions for different kinds of manufacturing do you mean one of the things that I find most exciting is in the additive space so in additive manufacturing today what we mostly see is making things all out of the same material so yes you get a unique shape or a unique form and we could 3d print any form we want but we're still just using one kind of material one of the most promising avenues that I see in manufacturing is using more than one material in one part because we're putting down material drop by drop if you want to think of it that way we have the possibility of putting a different drop of material at every point in space that is going to be impossible for humans to grapple with in the terms of design we are never going to be able to keep track of that possibility and that level of information it's perfect though for generative design generative design can very easily replace the mechanical hinge that I have on my glasses with a gradient material that goes from stiff to flexible to stiff all in one part so I think we're going to see a novel type of manufacturing arrive in the future at the same time I want to acknowledge that we already have manufacturing capability deployed on the planet we have different manufacturing plants that already do injection molding and casting and milling and whatever else the front end design process that feeds them could be improved to maintain design intent better and there too I think generative design is helpful in what we've already got thank you for the question any more okay yes thank you for your talk I have a question about frontiers because in your talk you focus on space on computer generated content computer generated design sometimes you compare computers to nature yes I missed something you spoke about construction what's about deconstruction and nature thinks about deconstruction things loud waste management reviews I think you are firm with the terms of circular design from cradle to cradle where do I found this in your super wide russian yes that's fantastic thank you for the question one of the things that I lament the most about our design and manufacturing process today is as soon as things come off the back end of the conveyor belt in the manufacturing process they are already dead we're making dead things as fast as we can they don't change they don't modify themselves they don't have a life they don't do anything and in fact we don't really contemplate what that end point is or how it could reconnect I do think that the possibility for broadening the vision of the design process is now becoming available what I would like to see is maybe the next cell phone for example is not one with a better camera but it's one that is compostable so maybe we're making things that keep taking mind what this lifetime looks like truly in the fullness of time and this gets a little crazy but what I really like to do is take the entire genitive process and put it into the object itself and that looks a lot like life we're getting to the point where we're able to manipulate DNA to cause cells to perform different functions cells actually are themselves computers and factories in one small unit it is theoretically possible that we can make a different kind of life or a lifelike object that modifies its behavior over time produces a different morphology and I think most importantly intersects with nature instead of trying to crush it thank you yes it's spectacular if we are manufacturing machines which are more intelligent than us maybe and can do everything better than us why should that machine be interested in make me more powerful and if it can make persons more possible who will be those persons will we have a monopoly of people who control these machines if there's any control at all yeah I don't know that I have all the great answers to those questions I think actually that is part of the dialogue that we've got to engage in it's my objective to show the things that are actually coming and make sure that everyone is equally aware of them so we can have conversation that said I think that the reason to be the reason I am excited about this and I want to share the excitement with you is these tools get at us the power to understand the consequences of our actions before we undertake those actions and I think that's critically important when we've got diminishing natural resources rising cost of energy and a whole lot of strife in the world if we could understand what might come next if we plan a project or what the long-term effects might be I think we can make better decisions so what I'm really showing is something that allows us to make better decisions I don't know another way to describe or delegate that power other than I wish it to be democratized for everyone to have so we can all be participating in the process Hello I'm not sure this question even applies but talking a little beyond the boundaries of design in the physical characteristics of design do you think generative design could be applied to concepts such as social social understanding of stagnant social systems in some way like for example the education industry for example is sort of reaching a plateau and there are several data points that can be got out of understanding what happens within personalities growing within a school environment do you think a system such as generative design not specifically that could be applied to sort of reform restructure social stagnant social social systems I have no idea right thanks over there hi I was wondering since you talked about a compostable phone and sort of the changes in our approach to how we handle resources and our limited amount of resources on the planet if you could see the generative design or a comparable system apply to a more global approach to resource management and maybe even a shift in the sort of economic underpinnings that lead us to a more yeah more wholesome and more future future oriented research management system a sort of global AI or computer based research management system I think those things are already happening and they lack the proper mentorship the fact that financial markets are already governed by these algorithms points to that fact thank you we have over here the guy with a great t-shirt yes yeah hello I've seen some of your further presentations and I'm interested in you spoke about re-entering the new age which is called the age of imagination and we are leaving this age of information now so my question for you is what would be your like favorite project you always wanted to have or you always wanted to design in the future which is it's hard to pick one honestly I can go into number of different angles I think the the one that the projects that I'm probably most excited about are the ones that eliminate the greatest amount of waste first so letting aside the exciting or exploration or experimental or inspiring ones just the one that's the ones that stop the waste the quickest are the ones that I think inspire me the most when I look across the building industry for example or the way that we build infrastructure you know everything from airports to roads to bridges to buildings and we realize that just in the construction of it alone 30 percent of the input goes to waste that to me is unconscionable and then if I think about the fact that buildings are designed without really a keen view of how they're going to be operated for 30 years and never monitored that's another opportunity to close a gap and eliminate more waste and I'd like to see those things happening first that's not to say that there aren't other exciting and opportune things that we can go after but if we're going to get to that future I think we have to stop squandering it today hello yes thanks for your talk it was quite interesting one thing I found missing from your talk for me itself it's a computing power of the problems like you showed the car and the main problem is not the algorithms or having the tool is like the having the computing possibility and since you're a company which is famous kind of to find your software cracked on the web so do you have any policy who you are giving your software your tools and do you have any moral obligation towards like governments because you know some governments use your tools to make museums and hospitals others makes them to use to make like design jays safe jays now with generative design other possibilities any moral obligation policies in your company thanks yeah it probably goes back to the company mission statement I showed you on the very first slide our mission is to help people imagine design and create a better world not a more screwed up one so every one of us does have a moral obligation inside the company that we exercise every day I will tell you a couple things related to specifics in your questions first of all the tools that I've shown here they only run in the cloud they absorb so much computing power requires so much computing power they're never going to run on the desktop or your laptop they're meant to be deployed across thousands to millions of machines the tools and their access that we grant are not pirateable these tools can't be pirated as our desktop software would have been so it's very challenging for them to fall into the wrong hands we have a list of those governments in those countries for which we are forbidden to sell to and it lines very closely with our moral thinking and our moral obligations so we actually have a better set of controls now with these tools than we have had historically in desktop software hi with generative design do you think it makes current technical design education redundant and if so what skillset do you think the next generation of designers will need it's a great question I don't think that studying the way things have been done is ever is ever redundant I think it actually helps understand the pathway and how we get to things and it develops kind of a an intuition in one's own mind so I wouldn't I would never take the pen out of a student's hand I think that connection is actually important in some way going forward though I think the things to study actually wind up becoming a lot more broad rather than narrow and I think that what we can really bring to problems and what we can bring to these tools is a breadth of understanding I think those are the types of skills are going to be most valued in education by students and by the world moving forward so I would encourage people and when I speak to designers I typically tell them go somewhere else when they come up up to me after a talk and say I agree with everything you said I said fantastic stop talking to me and find an area or a field that you disagree with and explore it thoroughly first of all I'd like to say that I really like your positive outlook on the future combined with the message that it's still us to create it yes but you've also mentioned that in the financial sector algorithms are already well managing most of the business right and I think that's especially the sector that serves best as an example how algorithms can destroy value because due to optimized decisions of selling and buying in minutes millions are wasted so how do the algorithms and how do we need to change the algorithms and us to create a better future you know I'm a CTO the T is for technology I wish I were a CPOP for philosophy or maybe ethics or something I I don't have that training to say what it takes for society to shift its values so that we are all operating in the same direction and we're not looking for short term returns or exercising and growing our own power and wealth at the detriment of others I don't know how to align those sorts of values socially that's not in my that's not in my training I wish it were true it's why I'm in this field and I'm not in that field I don't think that I would be successful either for myself or for the field if I were over there truthfully so I'm trying to make the help where I can sorry for the crummy answer it's honest answer hello and thank you for your talk I wanted to build on previous questions because with those with this great technology building a cloud and with this list of people who have access to it and who don't have don't you think that this is a limitation about who can ask questions to the algorithm and wouldn't we end up with much better results if more people had access I know that with this architecture you cannot just make it open source and give to everybody on every computer but maybe creating some simpler version some more accessible version and just allowing people from different places because today for example I was in a talk from Huggerspace from working a fast they were able to ask questions nobody from the west would be able to ask about how to help and I think this will be very very widespread in the design of things I like your question you're really asking about inclusion which is also something that we value at Autodesk so I should let you know I sometimes when I start talks I say who knows Autodesk who uses our products who pays for them okay it should be known every student on the planet 680 million have access to all of our software for free so that's pretty important so already those people who are young and making inquiries and really have I would hope a optimistic or at least possibility view of the future already have access to our software second thing is companies that are of smaller size pre-revenue etc typically wind up getting breaks and access to our software for free or radically reduced price it's the way that Autodesk makes its money is from the larger companies who are already using design as a value-generating element inside of their business you should also know that Autodesk has several hundred million consumer users of our consumer products that we've made specifically for people who aren't professional designers in their day jobs but have a need or desire for creative expression and we give those tools to them often for free or as apps you might find on the App Store one two three D series or Tinker CAD these are free or apps that cost just a few dollars so it's always been our our design or our mission to include as many people in the design conversation as possible and in fact I think the more people that can participate in design the more robust kinds of questions we can pursue and the better more robust answers we will manifest fully agree thank you just one follow-up are you going to give people access to that kind of generative algorithms any kind of small limited access for as you said students and small companies yeah so I would hope that just to be perfectly clear we haven't worked out the business model for exactly how we'll use infinite computing and da da da in generative design it would be my hope though that we've got a way for people to come in in on an on ramp and maybe there is some kind of you can't do everything right with the base tool but you can do some things and you could do meaningful things and then when you dedicate your profession or your product or whatever to generative design that's actually where we're aligning because we can agree that there's big value and we can participate in the value that you're creating so we've always tried to make that curve and I think we'll do the same thing for generative design so I think that's it thank you very much for your answers for your time Jeff Kowalski of Autodesk thank you
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We humans co-evolve with our tools. This is an ongoing dynamic with key inflection points throughout history, such as the move to agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution. We’re in another major inflection point now, focused on how one of our most powerful tools, the digital world, is expanding into a new realm, the physical world. While until only recently “the real world” and “the cloud” seemed to be so different, we’re now seeing that there’s a merging of the two, and it will only increase in future.
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10.5446/20642 (DOI)
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Okay. So, who here would define themselves as an activist? Some of you I know are. Put your hands up. Who would define themselves as being in the private sector? By the way, there's no need for those two to be mutually exclusive. We would define ourselves as both. Anyone here related to the government, any government, public sector? Okay. Anyone in any way connected in a workflow sense with the way stuff gets dug out of the ground? No one. Okay. So, we're going to do a little straw poll at the beginning at the end and be brutal, not nice. I'm going to ask you the same two questions now and at the end. If I say to you, we should have an open data framework of every molecule that might be monetized or consumed on the planet under some form of CC license that any of us could access at any time. How many of you would believe that that is politically possible? If I, every single molecule of everything that would be dug out of the ground that anyone would use, anyone would sell or buy in the entire world available to you at a couple of touches from any device you care to name. How many people think that is imminently, let's say, in the next one to two years possible? Politically. No one. Okay. Yes, there is a gold mine, there is a gold or reserve 300 meters under your feet which has precisely these grams of ore at this percentage which could be mined out under the following circumstances sold into international markets for three and a half billion dollars or not. That's a different question. We're coming to that. Nobody thinks it's politically possible. Anybody think it's technically possible within the next one to two years? Oh, okay, a sprinkling, a quarter. Okay. So yes, here's a quick overview. I'm hoping to get through this in 20 minutes and then we'll have time for questions. Natural resources are public goods and we'll expand that a little bit. That's your first question. Overwhelmingly. Carbon budget, we need to put that in place to understand why we might need such a global repository. The Paris agreements, I'm going to claim it's not one agreement but potentially 10,000 different agreements and that's very key. Then an explanation of what a universal open data framework looks like and finally a consideration of where we are now in this process. Okay, so just to get one thing out of the way, all people's made for their own ends freely disposed of their natural wealth and resources in the UN Covenants, the basis for international law. So you might think, yeah, right, like the Convention for Human Rights, it would be nice to have and so on. In fact, it turns out that this is the law already within the nation states of the world almost universally. Almost universally. The exceptions are, in fact, some of the lender here in Germany have indeterminate ownership to be decided on the case-by-case basis. The online, sorry, onshore United States is the big major exception. A few places in Canada where sovereignty doesn't rest in the states because the first peoples have their own sovereignty. Some former British colonial possessions which are essentially the hangover of sugar plantations but you are essentially talking about well over 90% plus of all major minerals under the ground in public ownership as a legal fact, not an ideological statement. So that's going to be important and we'll come back to it. So this is our conception then of the way these industries work right now and arguably empirically correct perception. They go in, they build stuff, they produce, they dominate, they own. All of that's true and we've we've all heard of the resource curse and the impact that these industries have the corrosive or corruptive effect that they have in countries with very weak systems of law and civil society. That is the reality but the nominal legal reality is a bit more like this. Does anyone here familiar with cricket? I'm a cricket nut. So these people are servicing the pitch in a lunch break okay. You see the ground staff there, the evening out the pitch, they're making sure it's ready for the next play. They work for the club. The analogy is that the people own the ground. These would be the companies in a service capacity again admittedly far from reality today but not far from the stated legal reality. This is the current stated legal reality and the world we experience is a divergence from it. Carbon budget. We need to run through this just a little bit because the question is why would we need such a thing? Why would we need to understand where every molecule of monetizable wealth under the ground is and why would that need to be available to everybody in the world? The Paris agreements essentially enshrine the concept of a carbon budget and it's worth just running through quickly. The global target which is now being signed up to by the way by 195 heads of state so you could disagree with the science, disagree with the policy implementation to try and solve the scientific problem although I imagine there aren't too many climate change denies in the room but this is in fact now stated policy as signed by 195 heads of state. The target is an average rise of two degrees in global temperatures. The science that that's based on says that there is a total carbon budget estimate which we'll just call X. I don't want to get into the confusing question of actual calculations but it's X, the total carbon budget which will limit climate change to two degrees rise but we're currently at X minus Y. Y is all of the emissions since the start of the industrial age and those that occur naturally by all kinds of natural processes, volcano, methane releases etc. So X minus Y is the remaining carbon budget but I still doesn't explain why we would need an open universal open data framework but the fossil fuel reserves which are registered by companies already proven and this is in a compliance context where their shell holders could sue them if they overstated it and in fact some of you may remember that the CEO of Shell had to resign about a decade ago because Shell did massively overstate their proven reserves. These are a critical element of those the market valuation of those companies. Those proven reserves are already twice the remaining carbon budget, the X minus Y. Therefore to meet this target only 50% or less than 50% of the proven current reserves can be produced before we hit that total ceiling. The rest will be stranded assets that's to say they'll just be left in the ground. Here's why we need the open data framework. Whose assets will they be? If we talk about a potential two to three trillion dollars of evaluated assets, fossil fuel assets in the ground and there's now a policy signed by 195 heads of state saying only half of them can now be produced which half? So yes so here we get to the Paris agreement and as I said it's not one Paris agreement it's many Paris agreements because it's a floppy internally contradictory kind of soup of an agreement which has led the purists in the environmentalist movement to be torn up about it. You could take another view and say it was what was diplomatically necessary to get a to get a process started in the first place. In any case it sets this figure of two degrees but it does not set any top-down mechanism to achieve it. There is no world government and there are there is this massive internal inconsistencies because each country has committed to limit its own future carbon emissions to a particular quantity. If you add all of those up all of those contributions the same scientists that the process is relying on would estimate that those individual country estimates and up to between 2.7 and 3.7 which really takes us into disaster territory. So it's a massive problem. Two things will happen if the process is going to work at all and save us from frying the planet. One is that that process will get tightened up the numbers will get tightened up and have to come down but the second is you still got this overall top-level framework agreement of two degrees and what that means is it's not going to be one top-down mechanism it's going to be any number of regional single-country multi-block combination of government and market bottom-up implementations bottom-up agreements and that means every single one of them is going to need open data and we'll just run through a couple very quickly. Here's one possible Paris agreement and I say there could be thousands. There's a distinguished scholar called Paul Collier who argues coal first most people argue coal first but within coal first Australia the United States and Germany why because those are the three rich world producers of significant coal industries and the moral imperative the historical imperative and so on but that would only happen in return for phased closure of coal in other countries which haven't yet polluted as much and which rely to a greater degree for their welfare on those coal industries such as Indonesia Brazil China Mozambique India and so on and within that calculation not all coal is equal there's going to be some coal that provides more jobs than other coal some coal is going to go into electricity to power fridges which are far too big and others are going to go into a single light bulb in a shack on the edge of Nairobi or Maputo so there will then be trade-offs because governments will be involved as well between whose coal gets the most development impact within this category even and then suddenly we need a financial model to start to predict that because the same coal with the same costs could have very different results in terms of jobs or even in fact electricity produced and also carbon emissions within the three big categories of oil coal and gas there are significant differences of emissions related to one kind of fossil fuel to another that's one case here's the second one suppose in the general arguments gas is generally considered to be the last fossil fuel which will be closed because roughly speaking it is half as intensive in terms of carbon emissions as coal with oil somewhere in between so it will be last but then the compromise is you already have to plan for the close so no new mega projects so the EU for example says it will refuse to accept purchases within EU countries from mega projects which around the world would be transported to them through something called liquefied natural gas where you freeze it to minus 180 degrees and put it in huge tankers which are constantly chilled to minus 180 degrees and you carry it around the world to a very limited number of massive industrial facilities so it's very easy to monitor suppose you had a policy like that how would you define a mega project well partly it's around around how much resources are in the ground partly it relates to the production costs why because the market and companies will not choose to develop any of these massive resources unless they can find global markets which means effectively unless they build massive pipelines or LNG projects which as we said are monitorable and visible so there's an interplay there between how much is in the ground and what it costs to get it out which leads you to needing needing what's called a reserves profile this is actually an iron ore cost curve but you can see the whole point of the why does corruption happen and and billions of dollars disappearing into people's pockets because it can and the reason it can is you sell at the same price so if the price of iron ore is a hundred dollars the production costs of one project could be 20 30 dollars earning 70 dollars profit another one which is still producing could be 95 dollars making only five dollars profit who's going to monitor all of that massive whack of super profit down at the bottom that left-hand side of the curve is exactly why the political economy of the Middle East has been what it is for the last 50 or 60 years it's explainable overwhelmingly yes I see it's a little bit yes authoritarian rule of one kind or another but it's mostly in this massive space here which creates the trillions of dollars of patronage which fuel autocracies forever and ever but you actually need to get a grip on those cost curves in order to answer that previous question of which gas projects would go ahead and which ones wouldn't so that's the idea of a transparent planet how far are we towards that now I'm going to suggest because this won't be the last time you hear of this in the years to come you can answer that question by addressing two other questions how many oil concessions are there in the world and are we in one now is this room in an oil concession okay does anybody anyone brave enough to guess any answers to either of those questions well I don't blame you yeah right I don't blame you because in answer to the first question I can guarantee you it's not the question of you not knowing nothing or us not knowing nothing I can guarantee you like Socrates that in fact nobody in the world knows the number of oil concessions this is our best attempt at it a bit of trumpet blowing that but we have taken a bunch of really crappy JPEG maps from oil ministry websites and we've entered them into a GIS system so this is open data you can zoom in and see the interaction and put other layers on and take them off and so on and we've found that data for about 110 countries around the world which means you know there's another hundred missing including some big ones like Russia but that's not the same as saying everybody knows nobody knows that number and the second question is well it you could potentially find out here if we were in an oil concession or not because Germany has relatively good data but in most of the world it would be impossible to find that out so our answer then to this question of transparency and where we are with it is a bit like Gandhi's answer to the question what do you think of Western civilization and he replied it would be a tremendous idea there's a big movement around transparency and EITI and all Kimberley blood diamonds initiatives and so on but really we are at 1% of where we need to be so there's two paths that need to go forward in order to reach this universal open data which in turn is what we will need to implement the Paris Agreement and by the way the same approach is going to happen with minerals as well not because of climate change but because of other so called planetary boundaries land use water use biodiversity there are massive global level problems which require transnational management so you have advocacy here keep going with these initiatives as they exist they've all been invented essentially within the idea that citizens of an individual state need access to information about those resources big fights super slow progress captured by vested interests and so on nevertheless they exist and they achieve some contributions hug global bureaucrats if you are used to defining yourself kind of very straightforwardly at one part of the political spectrum you may not like that or you may like that but here it's incredibly important because what we're talking about is the level of the need for transnational rule and governance of these natural resources and that means who are the natural allies in that regardless of their more normal positions all UN organizations the IMF the World Bank absolutely natural allies hug the global bureaucrats and keep the mega leaks coming do whatever you do that so we go back to this question of is it just politically possible at all are we just dreaming here is it just David against Goliath let's go back to that nominal legal reality in all but an absolute handful of countries and a fraction of the percentage of resources under the ground there is already public ownership so you have an argument from first principles to create this system and that's in fact is what all of the national level transparency movements are about it's also the answer to governments who say why should we give people on the other side of the world data already I mean the fact is countries seed parts of their sovereignty for all kinds of reasons the EU the UN the World Trade Organization and so on then some quick data artisanal principles curate all data already in public domain build analysis on top of that data get your own data this is a tool that we've built which basically scrapes all corporate filings in the world for all extractive industries all the time flattens out the text from the PDFs and makes it searchable which is not to overestimate what's in the corporate record embarrassing revelations are kept to a minimum for obvious reasons nevertheless companies tell investors a lot which they choose not to tell to the public and that we're able to join up the dots in that circle now because it's 2016 and we live in an open data world but there's a lot more of that artisanal work which could be done analyze having run searches through this data it turns out that the terms doubt going and concern if they occur within ten words of each other are basically pretty imminent sign that the company may be about to go bust it's a point at which they are forced for compliance purposes to report that the auditor has said there is doubt about them as a going concern so once you've it's a virtuous circle once you've run the searches to find those terms you then run those terms explicitly and you're able in a country like Zambia for example to identify 400 recent instances of companies they do business with which may be about to go bust and I was sitting with the Zambian Finance Ministry official last week who had no idea of these level of resources available but the third and the most important in the long term is collecting your own data now are we radioactive this is the general area so you'll see there isn't in this hall data this is a map of radioactivity with levels there which is created by a citizen science project it's all over Berlin not quite in this point here but we've got a better reading we've got a better reading that at least down at Stadmitter they're not radioactive and all of this is open data you can download it all of the time from a project called safecast which started in reaction to the earthquake and meltdown of the nuclear reactor in Fukushima in 2011 the Japanese government was giving out no data so a bunch of geeks because it's Japan put it together built their own Geiger counters there are a thousand of them out there and the result is a global map and this is where close to where we're standing now and if you want to join that initiative you can just buy one of these off Amazon for 650 bucks and it will connect it will collect compliance level data this nonprofit initiative is now consulted to that's the right term by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna by federal regulators in the US and in Japan all of a thousand pieces of kits like that which are openly viable and engineerable to compliance level and the ease of collection this is actually my son he's collected 20,000 data points by turning that kit on and walking around with it which is roughly the same amount of data points that has been published by the Japanese government it's about 23,000 the Japanese government safecast as a whole has coming up to 50 million data points in it so this is the most mature example but the same thing is coming open-source hardware techniques of analysis in the public space massively saturation collection for all forms of environmental impact including air quality including water and so on so collecting data is the third part of the strand but the most important in the long run and that's it but now let me ask this question again and be brutal who thinks that there is a reason to try and create a universal open data framework with all of the resources under the ground don't be nice but that's good that's good that's half from like you know virtually zero who thinks that it's politically feasible in the in the coming period slight increase slight increase that's it if there are any questions I'm happy to take them John thank you for talking I've got a question myself about this open-oil thing yes it's all fine and dandy but don't you think it's a little bit too late to concentrate on changing this industry because I think it would make would make much more sense to concentrate resources on developing the open grid like renewal bills etc we've got such projects in Germany and like in states solar city so consumers they're basically prosumers they can sell the energy etc and I think it's it's much more feasible to to do this kind of thing yeah and and the whole industry would become just obsolete if we concentrate on the thing right I hope I just no question that the oil industry needs to become obsolete absolutely as fast as possible the question of you frame it as an either or I guess but the response to the either or is how desperate you think the situation is in fact who is familiar with global feedback loops the possibility of for example the loss of the albedo in the Arctic Siberia methane the ice shelves in Greenland and apparently there's new one in Antarctica I don't know about it is actually possible that all of this is way too late it's possible but I'm not sure what to do about that with within business as usual and Paris agreement is business as usual we need to close down fossil fuels of all kinds as quickly as possible the question is how long there is no sustainable fossil fuel industry but 90% of the world's energy is still based on fossil fuels show anyone a way to switch that all off tomorrow and do something else and I'm sure about 10 trillion dollars of investment will follow so then the question is what is the quickest possible way to do it and what else do we need this isn't I'm not claiming this is a complete solution to the climate change problem yes thank you I would ask something as well okay so everyone question how helpful are the United Nations with this course and second question yeah so if you collect all this data isn't there already a lot of data which just needs to be made public second one is no which is the point of saying nobody in the world quite seriously not as a rhetorical statement nobody in the world knows how many oil concessions there are not the IMF not the World Bank not any individual government not any trade organization nobody the amount this is we are at 1% of the information that we need and in fact part of the problem is that activists have focused too much on trying to get the release of information they know already exists because that's what activists do whereas in fact that totality of information may represent five to ten percent of what we need in its entirety to create this kind of framework I'm sorry I forgot your first question that was your second question what was the first question the United Nations I mean potentially potentially yes but not not so far these are early days I mean the UN environmental program perhaps UN development program absolutely but let's not overstate even the the reach of these organizations I mean UNDP turns over three billion dollars a year it's a significant development agency with a lot more political legitimacy than nation state development agencies but that's about it it's nowhere near having the scale and level of impact and resources to deliver this right now but we're at the beginning of it yes we yeah I wanted to know you said the to reach the two degrees agreement in for Paris it represented half of the reserve was a proven reserve of hydrocarbon but if we added what every country individually agreed to use it will reach up to between 2.4 and 3.6 degrees this represent using also proven I reserve or no no sorry that may have been confusing that that is the scientific estimate of the end average rise in temperatures if in fact all of the countries fulfill their own individual country level contributions of reductions in emissions which could happen by any method at all it's not related to the fossil fuel reserves but if China does what it says it will and America does what it says it will and Germany and Ghana and so on then the problem is the huge contradiction within the process is that even that even if they do what they say they will adds up to between 2.7 and 3.7 so it's a huge contradiction to the overall stated goal which is only two degrees yeah thanks my name is Phil I work in the clean tech sector also right about it or climate change and clean tech the question regarding the data Bill McKibben and others usually and that's the figure I've seen a lot say have a much higher figure for proven recoverable reserves that we can't burn namely 2 3rd to 4 5th and now I was interested to see that you have a much much lower figure and I yeah I'll be interested in your take on that and then also secondly as regards sort of the end game I'll be interested in how we could use open data both in the clean tech sector and also in the remaining fossil fuel sector to further you know speed up this disruptive price trend that we have already have and I think we've seen that the Saudis maybe we'll already you know and recognizing that there's a limit to how much they can burn and that's why you know they want to get us out as much as fast as possible destroying the other oil industry in the process right you're absolutely right on the numbers I take those numbers from carbon tracker and they in turn fudge for the market because they're trying to influence the market so you're absolutely right those are on the high side and there are much lower estimates so I should put between 20 and 50 percent I think for all effective purposes of demonstrating the principle it does make a difference but you're right on the numbers in terms of further use of open data the same principles of open data applied to the stuff which is you know destroying the planet in one way or another could also be used to renewable energies opens here's an idea open street maps has a hundred and eighty million buildings as digital objects within its layer there are open algorithms which will give you sun trajectory hours of daylight a year therefore it's possible to there's a roughly 20 to 30 percent variation based on roof shape so within 20 to 30 percent margin of error you could produce customized building level estimates for how much solar energy somebody can get from that building in that place month by month year by year probably for under $20,000 for 180 million buildings serving perhaps a billion people on the planet that would be an example of use of open data to increase the disruptive forces explosive spread of renewables for example I think there's lots of examples like that so one more I'm told this is the last question I got the same message a very quick I think the pension funds are already in big trouble because let's say they can't take the money out and they are too expensive and the person got a point the question don't you think that new energies will just make the old stuff obsolete that there is no real need that oil has to be taken out yeah I think that would be great the answer the real answer is I don't number one I don't know number two that would be great but number three let's be conservative in the original sense of the term and therefore because we're talking about the survival of human civilization and let's assume that it's not going to happen in that neat and convenient way with minimal disruption and therefore carry on with some radical planning but I think that question evaluations this is a nonlinear change if all of this seems very far away all changes nonlinear we are sitting in a place in a city which 26 years ago nobody could have predicted a totalitarian regime was going to instantly collapse real change is nonlinear so your point about the pension funds and yours about the Saudis I believe is true I think it's very possible that this one trillion dollar flotation is precisely about the Saudis getting some cash from what they know is going to be an overvalued asset because the invest investment is going to flow away very quickly but unfortunately in my worldview that's still not the same as saying we can guarantee that's all going to happen on its own and just let it let it do its work okay thanks very much thank you very much
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Now world leaders have agreed – finally – to do something about climate change with the agreement in Paris at the end of 2015, everything changes in terms of the way we exploit natural resources. To manage that agreement, and quite literally to save the planet, we need an inventory of the world and everything in it – in open data. And, like any open data ecosystem, it will need millions of eyes on it. Why do we need it? What will it look like? What's your role in it? Come and find out!
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10.5446/20831 (DOI)
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Hi, Hennies! I'm back! Well, first, this is a cute kitten, of course. And this is like the second part of my talk that I held last year about sex, unicorns and awesome sauce. So let's get started. This is a project by BSBG Agentur Laboratories. BSBG stands for Bullshit Be Gone. And it's a project by the House of Nerdinger. Some of you might know what drag houses are or voguing houses. House nerding is the same for nerds. Queer, non-binary, cyborg nerds. So, here we go. We have to ask things. Is something sexy or sexist? Because sometimes people get something a bit muddled up and they sometimes think something that just shows sex, maybe sexist, or the other way round. So, welcome to Face Palm Beach. Oh, God, this picture is very dark and you can't see it. It doesn't matter. Okay, welcome to Face Palm Beach. The image in the background is a city, a friend of mine built on Skyline Cities and I thought it was so nice. And he asked me, oh, do you want, what name should I give it? I said, call it Face Palm Beach and I can use the picture in my talk at Repubblica. So we did it. He's also a member of my house. So, I will start with a bit of a perspective. I hope you can see what this is. It's a very dark picture. Maybe the lights can be dimmed a little bit. And it's just showing where we are. I was here on planet Earth because I want to put you into perspective before I really start. Do you know what this is? Anyone know what this is? Okay. It's Earth Flag, a proposal by the designer Oscar Pernfeld and it's supposed to represent planet Earth and also the people living on planet Earth and remind people on planet Earth that we are all living on this planet and therefore the same and we have to take care of each other and the planet. And a part of the aspect of taking care of each other and taking each other seriously and having fun on Earth as human beings is sex and the representation of sex, maybe also in commerce and adverts. So back to Face Palm Beach. But before we stay here, I want to take you on a little ride yet. So I'm going to fast forward through the time vortex and we arrive on the 2nd of May, 2015, 2016 in 500 years and it looks like that. And here in this futuristic city, there's a teacher walking around with students that have come in from the rural area where they live sort of a bit like a Star Trek economy, sort of everyone's fine but not everyone lives in these mega cities and they come to this mega city and the teacher sort of trying to get the kids to the museum and then the kids suddenly see this advert. It's just there, this advert and they go talking about a party they want to organise and oh yeah, oh we shagged each other there and then oh yeah, pretty normal as if the kids were seeing an advert about sport and talking about themselves playing that sport like playing football or cricket or whatever. And this is the label, it's about outer space mobiles, yeah, terrassenmobil, you can say in German. And the teacher just says okay kids, yeah, it's not talking about your weekend plans but what you've seen here, I can teach you a bit of a lesson because 500 years ago before the shift, before the world became the way we live in it now, things were a bit different and I'll tell you something about a very normal product like milk, where 500 years ago some people selling milk sold it with sex, not the way we would baby, showing people having a fantastic orgy in a pool of milk, but it's a bit more one sided that lots of you know this. I left out a special motive because it was a special e-crap. Anyway, and the kids say oh yeah, it's only women and the teacher says well, that was times when people thought sex was something only certain people were interested in and the other people were supposed to sort of provide it but those people providing it, women, weren't sort of really interested in sex so they were more passive whereas the men were the ones pursuing the sex. And then one of the boys says oh well that's boring, didn't they have any cheesecake boys? So he, yeah, and the teacher says yeah, you're right, sometimes the word cheese cake boys but mostly for men who like men because people like to presume 500 years ago that pursuing sex and having fun with sex was something only men would do because if women do it, there's lots. So we go back in time, back to our timeframe through the time vortex and here we are again, back here in Berlin and I want to show you a world of fails to sort of go into the subject now. This has got nothing to do with the floor. It might be plausible for a bikini advert or for lingerie. Yes, it's wrong she but it's a bloody advert from people providing floors, selling floors to people who are building houses or sort of remodeling their flat and there's this woman on the floor or on the tiles not wearing any panties. I don't know, she'll catch her death on those cold tiles. I wouldn't want to lie there. And I bet it's just sort of a photoshopped stock picture on there and everything but I don't want to think of lying on those tiles and look at their comic sons. So the people making it must have been a bit daft. Or this mixed with racism. Very nice as if people ordering pizza are only horny men that have a fetish for women that come from a different part of the world where we are bonkers. Or even this crap. Oh yeah, you're old dog on now the other new one. Oh lovely lady. Yeah, yeah. Who do you think they're selling it to? Mordor? Or here this lady on the carpet with her lovely jugs and I think God, of course people will start shit storms these days in 2016 because they've just had enough of this narrow minded representation of sex to entice people to buy their products because I think it was in the beginning of 2016 a great Guardian article said for tech conferences or tech fairs why don't you not get rid of the booth babes but bring in the booth boys to entice people who like men, men or women or whatever type of people on the gender spectrum that will also feel welcome and know that we are meant like me liking men. I meant that if people sell something to me with a male body and say okay they mean me actually. I like that. I might even want to buy it even more than just normally. And on the other hand I think instead of just always wanting to sell with sex you can just have a couple even if it's a bit heteronormative but you can sort of think a little bit further than the tip of your nose maybe just one inch and it would help and maybe prevent you from getting a shit storm. Or you could do it even nicer and one of the most inclusive things is selling things with cute animals like cats. Everyone likes cats and I think people look at it, the face of a cat is something especially from people on the internet are instantly drawn to cats, dogs, cute animals, big eyes, owls or whatever and it works and it won't give you a shit storm. And Mr. Marcia has also said that okay after especially what happened in Cologne that he wants to sort of spark a debate and also maybe pass a law now to ban sexist adverts in Germany. I think it was Friedrich Hein Kreuzberg where it is also already banned here in Berlin, is that right? And did it work? Okay. That's what I thought because the debate has to be a bit more nuanced than just ban something and you have to also know what sexist and what's not and talk about it. That's what I want to do. So we will talk about what is sexist and here we go into a bit of a grey zone because like I said just because something has sex in it, it doesn't have to be sexist. It's like these brutalist buildings. It's nice to look at lots of grey in there but it's not black or white. So this advert for example I saw that at a gas station when I was driving down to the Easterheg in Salzburg and a friend said look at that, that would be something for your presentation. They were right because it's showing men and women having fun. Okay, it's a cigarette advert. I don't care but it was really just showing people having fun. Maybe even you can see these washing machines and you see here all it's about them going in the rain and then going to the wash salon and then having it, their clothes maybe in there and they've somehow got shopping carts, I don't know why and they're having fun. But the good thing is you can see men and women equally represented as something fun and sexy, lively, I like it. Or this company that sells liquorice. I don't like that stuff but my partner does. But I've always seen their ads and they started, I think that was a couple of years ago with Dom's a bit kinky because the black, liquorice and the latex and leather is okay and it wasn't really offensive. I thought it's just maybe sexy but not sexist. And some other things they did like with a cute animal as I said, with a cute raccoon, well executed and then I saw this this year. It was on the 8th of March. I was riding home with a colleague after we'd encountered some blatant sexism, really stupid sexism and I saw this advert and I thought, oh my God, that's so great. It's doing exactly what most other adverts are doing with female bodies, doing it with a beautiful male body and I looked it up online and there were discussions and there was lots of people were saying and I found that interesting, oh, why isn't there an offshie about that one? Why aren't people giving the company a shitstorm because of sexism? That's not how it works because showing a man like that can also still imply something sporty, fitness, I don't know what, but not only just sexualization, that's reserved for women. But people see something naked and equated no matter what it is. Oh, it's naked, it must be sexist. No, that's wrong. It's the context that it's in and you might have it disembodied there which mostly with the female body is demeaning, but with a man it's a bit of a sort of, yeah, it's got a different context and a different feel and it also sets men who may see it and they think, oh God, I don't know what we might feel if I just see this disembodied man. And this advert too is something that I found interesting. People thought this advert for this roller skate night in Dusseldorf was sexist. In fact, it's just showing this woman in a sporty outfit with her partner apparently also in shorts, he's cleaning her roller skates. I don't think that's sexist. Do you think it's sexist? It was just this knee jerk reaction to showing a woman lying somewhere, maybe showing a bit of leg, but actually not being really objectified. She's more shown as a sporty person who's just relaxing after rolling all through Dusseldorf and being active. That's not a sex object to me. So we must ask, yeah, where is the misogyny and is there really a conspiracy out there against women? I would say, okay, this lady's wearing a beautiful tin foil hat, but she shouldn't because at the bottom there's actually a completely different animal there. And I say this animal is not people thinking, oh, let's make some demeaning advert so that women feel bad. It's mostly more unbalanced habits and presumptions about people that make, of course, your everyday work in an advertising agency, marketing or whatever, easy that you know, oh, it's men, oh, it's women, these and these target groups. So we put this into that bin, that into the other bin, and we put that into there and job done. And I can go home and have pizza and watch Netflix. But sadly enough, if you make it easy for yourself, mostly bullshit comes out. So you have presumptions like this. Of course, you also can call it market diversification because if you have one toy for girls, one toy for boys, you can say, oh, yes, can sell more toys to parents that have different types of children, but it's bullshit. Another thing is something I found in a semester book of my partners, I found that very interesting just by chance. And it was this, it was sort of this book with all sorts of different types of info, stunt plan, and so on. There were even cocktail recipes in there. And I saw, going through it, I saw all these tips about wearing suits. And I thought, oh, where are the business tips for female, for female attire? There was none in. There was none in for business clothes for people who aren't men. And then I looked to this stunt plan. And I hope you can see it. It's a bit hazy here for me. And you can see these sexy looking female students in the foreground of this timetable and maybe some boys at the background. That's what I would say is the typical knee jerk reaction because this plan is made for students for the LVTH Aachen. That's an engineer's university. And you always have this stupid presumption. All of them are men. So all of them will be men. And that's one of the deep problems why there's diversity strive in the tech community. And now I come to another thing. These adverts, I also see on my way home in Düsseldorf. They are for a company that sells suits for men. And you can see the presumption here that a man identifies himself through women. Totally heterosexual. It's thinking that just because you're a man and you want to be a manly manly man, so it must be somehow linked to boobs. Or even completely stupid stuff like that. And I researched and the CEO of the company said, oh no, it's not sexist at all. It's about showing women having the upper hand and the men being the toys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Old story. Yes, she's got that upper butt there. Yeah. This is even worse. There was also a similar thing with musical instruments. It made me think of a very old meme, this picture. I'm going to show it to you. Maybe some of you will be thinking, this is a really old meme. I remember seeing it in 1998. Classic. The next thing is this actually happened in Thailand, I think, where apparently this man shown here was sexually assaulting a Porsche. So maybe those ads aren't so good after all, that poor Porsche might have not given its consent. And so you can say this is a one way straight lead into death because you are doing one thing to death. This thing came to me through Twitter. It's absolutely crazy. And I asked the people, I think it was on Twitter people from Pink Stinks who had also tweeted it. And I asked them, well, who made it? Was it an agency, a small agency, who made this thing for this butcher shop? And they butchered their own ads for finding young employees and to learn the art of selling meat in a shop. So you can stand there in a bikini with a big piece of meat. And I found out it was a woman who made it, but the woman even owning the place. And she gave an interview to Forecourse saying, oh, well, I just wanted it to be a bit cheeky. But not thinking one step further because she could have gone and had the same pose with a young man and it would have been like Adam and Eve of meat. Not sexist, just funny or maybe a little bit tasteless, but not sexist. The same thing here, this is something that spawned a lot of strife. There's a long story behind this one. Oh, this is going to be funny. I come from the black forest. So I thought, oh my God, it's the same old thing again, showing a woman. They could have just had the same thing with the male thing and thought of maybe big pine cones and whatever can be long and large, like the trees in the black forest. Have you seen the trees in the black forest? They are long and large. Now then, well, actually, I was told when I saw this, well, actually, the idea for this ad came from a woman. You must understand, young lady. So please lighten up. It is all in the ment. Ironically, it's supposed to be cheeky. So my dear, don't take it so serious. This actually makes fun of sexism and you should actually like that. So it's actually doing what you want and shut up and don't be such a killjoy. I swing both ways. I like Star Wars and Star Trek. I'm star by. Oh, I love Cisco. Anyway, it goes back to this city of Traberg in the black forest because it was a woman who made it a young designer, a student from Traberg. In the black forest, a beautiful city and it has a very famous waterfall, very beautiful, very scenic. And I actually, even when they were as a teenager, was 13 with blue hair, just getting into electronic music and we were in this youth hostel and it was terrible. We were woken up every morning with the Gypsy Kings. All of us were going crazy. And another thing that they did in Traberg was in one of the communal park houses. There was this weird corner parking space where the burgamizer, the mayor said, oh, it's so hard to get into. It's not for women, it's a men's parking space. So yeah, of course, women can't get in there. This woman could. So the burgamizer asked, and I think it was a pensioner to paint this. He didn't enjoy doing it, but he did it. But it's a bit botched, isn't it? It looks stupid. It doesn't even look normal. It looks like something a child painted. It reminds me of this. I instantly thought of that. It's botched Jesus, potato Jesus, I think it's called. So other people came there and sort of painted over the woman. So it just looks like a normal, scenic, painted, weird landscape. Next thing is something that happened near Dusseldorf with the coffee truck. Coffee company, selling coffee to companies, to other companies, mostly secretaries ordering the coffee with a gay driver who had been there for 20 years even, had this. The boss wanted the trucks to look a bit more interesting. The driver refused to drive that car. They ended up in front of court. The owner of the company lost his longtime employee and a lot of customers were unhappy, whereas they could have put something like that on there too. Easy does it. And the comments section in Werben und Verkauf and three comments, I picked this up last week, you can read that comment section. The company should think about the people buying it instead of having one weird person, the boss here, deciding to put on this bullshit because it seems they might have been into cartooning. You know what cartooners are like. This, on the other hand, is a better example for having a cleverly done delivery van from Russia where it really looks as if there's a huge loaf of bread in this van. It's awesome. People will look at it. Is that glass? Is that a big, oh no, it's a painting. Awesome. So you can strive for progress. You don't have to be perfect. And I've got some examples for great sexy ads now. This is an agency from New York that sort of rebranded itself and the owners, the people running it, decided to do it, sort of show themselves naked, fresh start, and went to the gym and went through all sorts of weird regimes to become fit. Look good for this campaign. And I must say it's really, really good because it's men and women, of course, okay, they're able-bodied. They are very fit. It's a certain type of body that they had to put a lot of effort in, but it's still an evenly showing people being sexy, being alluring, and not just female bodies as meat. The same thing, the same photographer was also for Equinox, a luxury gym from the States. And they had this very sporty but sexy campaign after they had this campaign shot by Terry Richardson. It reminds me a bit of Lady Gaga, but the next one is really, really silly. Look at that. The way the woman is like this crab on the floor and the man looking at her like some derpy, herpy derpy. That was my reaction. It's just stupid. But afterwards, they changed it and wanted to show people look. It's still looking sexy, but men and women more diverse and something like this came out. And I actually like looking at these ads, or even something like that, another orgy, but it's people together having an orgy and they look very good, they've all been to the gym and they've not had a lot of donuts to eat and they look awesome. So these examples are great. Another thing is you just need more diversity, also concerning bodies. Sports Illustrated has their famous swimsuit issue now with the plus size model. They're getting there. And there's also this thing that they sort of getting these realistic comparisons that you know with female bodies and Photoshop, they're doing the same with men now. So you can notice that it's better to show someone sexy, maybe even sporty, but have more diversity in there so that people can recognize themselves in the brands and know, oh, okay, I can maybe go to the gym and look good, but hey, there's someone a bit bigger, a bit smaller, and so on and there's more identification there. So the bottom line is if you want to sell with sex, think inclusively. Try and just think more than just in your normal boxes and if you don't know, if in doubt, just use your fucking product or if in doubt, use a cute animal. And now I just want to also say the most important thing is talk about representation and forget that sex is something that only straight men look at and start thinking of balancing because one example is the series Outlander about a woman going back in time to 18th century Scotland. They had a revolution on the screen showing beautiful sexy man in a set, several sex scenes in one episode, the wedding episode, watch it, it's revolutionary. It's anti-gamers, there's still violence in there, there's lots of whiskey drinking and sexy people, but not just women. And so if you start thinking about more perspectives and more different views of sex, you can stop having this typical type of strife where people are bickering about, hey, Mimi, you're being so speasing as you say in Germany, you don't want sexy adverts anymore or how Taniqo the editor of Bildzeitung and I think what she said there was terrible, I don't begrudge anyone, you can have your own self-help group, she said that to stop Bailed Sexism, the campaign to stop having page one or page three girls, which I think is in itself a good thing, I signed their campaign, but I think you also have to think of the other side and say maybe we can have sex but invite the boys along the girls or we just don't do it. So girl, Taniqo, think before you speak and insulting people that want to make things better. So I want to leave you just with the thought that being more diverse and thinking about how you concoct an image, you can stop having a shit storm just because you do the knee jerk naked woman on a floor, you can maybe just put a couple on there, put a cat on the floor or maybe show I don't know, parrot's drinking coffee, it's more interesting. That I think was it, thank you very much. Do we still have time? Okay, so maybe short Q&A, great. Any questions? We still have three minutes I was told. There at the back. Stop microphones coming. But actually, but actually this is the one and only question because we don't have more time. Okay, just briefly you mentioned in the beginning after showing Haiku Masa and the law thing that it's important to have a definition of sexism. Yes. And then it's not the easiest way to just prohibit things. So I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on those two parts. Well, that's what it was about. It was this talk was about the alternatives for forbidding things, this whole talk. Okay. Thank you.
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Sexy ads are often made in the seaside town of Facepalm Beach where creators and their customers like to be tongue-in-cheek and a little provocative. Everyone has a lot of fun creating in Facepalm Beach. But when launch day comes, shitstorms brew up in the sky above those happy creators. These storms can damage businesses and reputations and cost jobs. It does not have to be that way. Let's look at Faceplam Beach's sex selling logic and why it needs some competition.
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10.5446/20832 (DOI)
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What I'm going to do is to talk about a different aspect of hacking team, not the technical but a political one. How was hacking teams actual surveillance in Latin America and what implications did all these have? Let's just get over there. So we are a non-governmental organization from part of the digitalists. We defend and promote the human rights on the internet from a Latin American perspective. This is important because most conversations regarding privacy security come either from Europe or the United States and no offence there but our realities in Latin American countries are very different democratically and institutionally. So today we want to talk about surveillance and the actual impact of surveillance and the consequences of specific hacking teams surveillance. I wanted to show you because it's actually very creepy what hacking team does. So I'm really glad you did the metadata analysis on them also. You have no challenges today. Sensitive data is transmitted over encrypted channels. Often the information you want is not transmitted at all. Your target may be outside your monitoring domain. Is passive monitoring enough? You need more. You want to look through your target's eyes. You have to hack your target. You have to hit many different platforms. You have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data. Being stealth and untraceable. Deployed all over your country. Exactly what we do. The hacking suite for governmental interception. So yeah that's actually hacking teams commercial. It's this big Italian as they were saying spyware manufacturer. Just a little bit about what the type of content that they can actually they can this offer can be actually used to take. It's password messages and emails, contacts, calls, microphone and camera that can also be remotely activated whenever they want without you noticing it. Information from Skype, Facebook, Twitter or any social network. Geographic location, hard drive. Every single letter pressed from your keyboard. Every single mouse click. Whatever you delete. Whatever you're seeing. It's practically having a public officer behind your back seeing what you're doing and registering it at every single moment in every digital realm of our private lives. So it's not only about mass surveillance. This is targeted surveillance and it's not only surveillance regarding metadata. We just made reference to Edward's note and the NSA but it's also content surveillance. This is an example of what they can actually see. This was published by the intercept in 2014. So we have these John Doe social networks and the most contacted the social networks here. The most contacted people and the most visited websites and of course geo location in real time and all those things. And when you think about surveillance offline it's always been part of the state but in internet it's made much worse because all of what we think and are on a daily basis is reflected on what we search, who we call, if metadata can reveal that much amount of personal information this is just completely 100% intimate. So the good news was that hacking team was hacked last year by a hacker called Phineas Fisher and this hacker published 400 gigabytes of information regarding hacking team of which the metadata analysis that we were hearing about before was made with the exchange of emails that was published in this hack but it's also contracts, payment receipts, every single thing the governments could not deny they had not done or negotiated with hacking team. He actually, the hacker, she hacked the Twitter account and recalled hacking team hacker team and just published everything there it was great and she says that's all it takes to take down a company and stop its abuses against human rights is the beauty and symmetry of hacking. What did we learn from the hack? So there was a lot of information and what we did in the digital is to make a nine month investigation about the legality of this type of software in Latin America. This is our report you can find it online in the digital.org. It's only Spanish right now but there's a summary in English for those that are interested. Our main conclusions were that hacking team software does not comply with existing legal standards in the region. It's illegal. It's use it's illegal and non-dually infringes upon free speech, freedom of information, privacy and due process. But one of the most interesting things was that okay so in the report we also did we tried to communicate better how hacking team works at a technical level. It's a very complicated thing so we make this little colorful graphs and the important thing to notice here is that hacking team software goes through a series of anonymizers. So the end point of Galileo software in Mexico had to go to four proxies. It went to Korea, no not Korea sorry like Honduras, Australia and New Zealand before actually getting to Mexico. So it opens up a lot of questions. Why is my data revolving around the world? What are the protections for that? And of course it makes it much more harder to trace. So if you don't know you're being spied upon because of course the nature of spying is secret then you cannot exert anything against and resist it. To our surprise most countries in Latin America either contacted or negotiated with hacking team. It means the ones that are in reddish are the ones that bought the software. We made an analysis of how much money did each government spend in Mexico. A country that is going through a serious human rights crisis was the most important hacking team client in the whole world. Buying almost six million dollars of surveillance software. And then we have also Honduras, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil and Colombia in these countries marked with yellow are the countries that we know that hacking team was used to spy on activists or political opponents. So that's Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia will tell you a little bit more of the stories later. And what worries us also is that there is an increased interest for Latin American governments to buy surveillance software. Brazil bought almost 50,000 euros worth of the hacking team software but they are also producers and manufacturers of another surveillance software called El Guardián that they also sold to Uruguay. In Colombia after the drug war surveillance is just part of the daily activities and there is a little scandal that will tell you about it later but it's completely out of control. And in Chile what strikes us here is that Mexico is a much bigger population and there is over 11 agencies that bought the software but Chile spent a little bit less than half of the money that Mexico spent but only for one single police investigation department. So that's something that is really striking. When you see the map and all this information put together we know that there is something to worry about. Given the close relationship of Latin American governments with authoritarianism and non-democratic governments the use of these tools is especially alarming. In Mexico this is a picture of the protests of the 43 disappeared students and in Mexico there is a very strong and sad reality where governmental authorities and organized crime are the same thing. We saw it when the police disappeared the 43 students and now the official version we know that the military was also involved in the open fire against 108 students. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This happens in Mexico not all the time but at least we've been hearing about cases of once a month. They recently found a grave with 408 bodies that they could not identify and it's the police and the military that are doing this thing. So when hacking teams say that they only sell to governments it's a complete lie because when you are giving this to the surveillance software to the Mexican government you're giving it also to the organized crime and that's something that we must take into account. I don't know if this reality could be replied or it's the same anywhere else but it's something that must be taken into account of consideration especially when talking about hacking teams responsibilities. So the other side of the coin is that of course in a country where Chapo Rosman one of the biggest drug lords of the cartel de Sinaloa escapes two times from prison of course you might think well surveillance software is needed right? We need to catch him again and he will probably escape again because of a terrible Mexican corruption in jails. But what we saw in the report is not only that 8 out of 10, 8 out of the 11 authorities that purchased the hacking team software cannot use it it's illegal but also in the government of Puebla used remote control system to spy on political rivals, academics, students of a university and even journalists. And the Mexican government agency requested the 2074 judicial orders which we don't know if they are justified or not there's no way of holding those many judicial orders accountable. It's a screenshot of hacking teams Excel document that we could see because of the hack and this is very striking too because the Mexican oil it's a private state oil company and they bought hacking team software. So what is the control there? What are they using before? How do I know that any one of these non-authorized agencies are using it for personal advantage of personal gains spying on their wives or husbands or whatever. There is absolutely no legal control regarding this. The Ninequador the technology was used to spy on an opponent of the government of Rafael Correa that was Dr. Carlos Figueroa. The picture is a picture of the protest of 2010 when there was a big questioning of Correa that some have called an intent of a coup d'etat and Dr. Carlos Figueroa has always been an opponent. He was put in jail in 2014 because of a criminal libel against the president of Ecuador and then he was infected with hacking team and we know this because of the leaks as well. The story was published by Associated Press. WikiLeaks some people are getting confused. WikiLeaks is not the platform that released all these documents but they did provide with a search engine that was very useful to serve through all this information. It's like finding an idling in a haystack. It was too much information so WikiLeaks and this is a screenshot of because of hacking team will learn that all the traffic of Colombia was intercepted by the DEA the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States. So we also have all this interventionist culture of the United States also being used as inspiring in Colombia. Colombia at the end did buy also hacking team software and this is just one of the emails that were exchanged because they needed help, the DEA needed help from the hacking team people. In Panama now that there would be this big scandal, the Panama Papers, the government bought surveillance software in 2011 under the direct order of President Ricardo Martinelli. He was on the phone during the meetings telling him to put them on speaker and to say everything that they could to report back to him. Then in 2012 they had elections, the software was just magically went missing after Ricardo Martinelli's handpicked successor lost the election. It just went missing. This opens even more questions. How does something this powerful and dangerous just go missing without any consequence? Where is it? Who is using it? Do they know how to use it? Where are they using it against? I forgot to tell you earlier but this software can be implanted either by USB sticks which is usually done in airport control and security revisions. It can be used in fake Wi-Fi spots or actual Wi-Fi spot where they just bypass your password. The most common method has been through phishing which is the sending of this fake links that once you click you get infected or once you open a document you get infected. That was the case of Carlos Figueroa. They sent him a fake invitation to an event and then he opened it and he was infected. In Chile, this is the picture of the Policía de Investigaciones, the investigative police, they said they bought it. They did buy it because most governments, the Mexican government of course tends to deny everything so they just denied it and nobody can explain how because all the emails and all the information is there. There's very little to deny. But the investigation police of Chile did recognize that they bought the software but they said they were using judicial orders in their application. This is still doubtful because one, we don't know if judges actually know what they're authorizing and two, if it's not regulated by law then how are judges justifying the use of the software? If it's not explicitly regulated and if it's not regulated you cannot use it. It's very simple. It's the opposite of citizens. We can do whatever is not prohibited but authorities can only do what is explicitly permitted. Surveillance comes, this is a picture of Augusto Pinochet, the dictator that was in power in Chile from 1973 to 1990 and in the region, in Latin America, surveillance is part of the government since the dictatorship era. So what are we going to do now with this software and all the implications that it's had being that it's used in every single country, it's illegal. One other interesting fact that was also, it was published by the intercept because of the vasten our agreement, all the exports and imports can have to be done through an intermediary. It means like other enterprises, the hacking team cannot directly sell and in the region it was Robotec in Colombia, Ecuador and Panama and nice systems that was also mentioned earlier in Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala. The intercept published about this person called Ori Solar that was an AK-47 arms dealer that was in charge of the hacking team negotiations and that is also something extremely worrying. How do we have an AK-47 arms dealer now dealing with weaponized software and what are the controls for this? What does this imply in Colombia, in Guatemala, in Honduras? It's also very paradoxical for us, this is a quote from the report because the main goal of Galileo is to aid criminal investigation and intelligence systems to safeguard democratic society but they are doing it with on democratic methods, they are doing with opacity, illegality, violation of human rights. So this is not even a topic of the mean justifies the way because the mean is also flawed itself in terms of democratic transparency. So the final question, how do we resist? It's kind of a difficult one because hacking team can actually bypass encryption, now David Vincenzi, the CEO is actually bragging about bypassing Tor. So how do you resist something that is so invasive that not even encryption can get you by? Of course we could say with mass surveillance there's things that we could do to protect ourselves, we could answer also that we should push for more and better regulation regarding this type of weaponized surveillance software. But then the question is in Latin America even if there's good laws and even if we win that fight, the implementation of those laws is still going to be enhanced of corrupt and arbitrary authorities. So what is the game here? And also even though regulation could exist, whenever an application can be used for surveillance and control, it will be used for surveillance and control in or outside of the law and that is something that we have learned over the years. So the question about resistance, it comes at the end and we've heard it a lot this first day of republic attack to use our consciousness of our privacy and our persons and intimacy being surveilled. There's things that of course we can do technically wise to not open weird links that weird people send us over the internet, verify that whenever someone sends us an email we can verbally verify that person is actually sending it, protect ourselves with VPNs so Wi-Fi cannot be used to infect those type of things. And this is the final question. It's up to us at the end and to push for more and better control of this software. Not only in Europe because in Europe now there's a directive that implements the Bassenaer agreement at some level. It's in January 2015 but in general all over the world there's also a very clear responsibility of the Italian government to investigate more and more in these practices. As for Latin America, this software and any surveillance software for the matter is illegal. It can amount to a lot of abuses and I am here as part of the digitalize to denounce this. And thank you very much. That's it. This is my contact information in case you want to do anything else. And I was wondering if there were any questions. Thank you. Hi. Thank you so much for your talk. I just have a simple and very small question. Do you have any data on Bolivia and Paraguay which were left blank on your map? Because I think due to changes in the law in Bolivia as well as in Paraguay, doors are quite open for mass surveillance. Maybe you can tell us a bit more about that. Yeah, definitely. They were left blank. I don't know if you can... I cannot zoom in. They were left blank because they are the two governments that... And it was not Paraguay. It's only Bolivia. And then it's Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the French Guyanas that did not buy... And Suriname that did not buy the software. Bolivia negotiated. There's some emails that talk about an appointment for a negotiation but at the end that didn't pan out so they didn't buy anything. That's where you can see... And this Bolivia planned to meet with Hacking Team but there's no further confirmation whether that meeting took place at least from the leaks. For the rest of the countries, it's a very little percentage of Latin America that they've not at least tried to contact or negotiate with Hacking Team. And this talks about a very big surveillance market in Latin America. There's money, there's people and there's national security problems so it can be... All those things when they come together, they pan out a very worrying panorama on the topic. Thank you. I hope I answered it. One second, microphone's coming. I suppose they also compared us to Hacking Team. Would you know anything about, I don't know, American, Chinese, other companies who would be targeting the Latin American market? In terms of Hacking Team's competition? Yeah. Offering the same kind of services but I suppose there will be others, right? Yeah, definitely. Citizen Love has a very good report on... Just launched a really interesting report on PACRAD which is another surveillance software and it was very scandalous in Ecuador because it explicitly targets political opponents and dissidents. There's also in Mexico and I believe it's Argentina, it's Finfisher of Gamma Group that is also being used in the region but definitely I would say Hacking Team is the most prominent even though there's other competition in the region. Any news on Cuba? What Cuba is doing? No, I know Dominican Republic did buy Hacking Team software. Cuba is kind of a mystery still. I'm not aware of the Cuban government buying or negotiating with Hacking Team specifically and in Derechos Digitales we still don't know if we are going to do actual work in Cuba or not now that it's opening and all these things but it's definitely something to take into account and consideration given the geopolitical implications that could have. Any more questions? Okay, perfect. Thank you very much for all your time.
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On july 5th 2015, 400GB of information regarding Hacking Team – the Italian company that sells surveillance malware to governments all across the globe – was filtered. In Latin America, most countries contacted and negotiated with the enterprise. Nonetheless, the use of the malware in the region is illegal and amounts to grave violations of human rights. Given the history of authoritarian and dictatorial countries in the region, how do we analyze the implications for democratic institutions in these countries? What is the impact for dissidence and journalism and in the region when facing this invasive malware?
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10.5446/20834 (DOI)
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Yeah, I'm very happy to welcome such a diverse group of experts here on stage today. What I find very awesome is that we both have practitioners in the field of, let's say, refugee camps, but on the other hand we also have researchers in that field. So and also people as we realize from all the different kind of countries with all different kind of experiences. So I'm really looking forward to that panel. I'm briefly going to introduce people and explain a little bit what they did regarding that topic that we're talking about today, innovation in refugee camps. So it's not an overall bio, but something that I found interesting. So next to me is Kian Klenchmüt. He's the former manager of the Sattery Camp in Jordan and one quote that I found from him and he can elaborate on that maybe later on is that arms are so derogatory, meaning maybe thinking about aid in a different kind of way. Then we have Malin de la Chau. She's a researcher on business activity and informal markets and refugee camps, among other things. And some quote that I found from her says, let refugees decide themselves what they want their camps to look like. Then we have Ana Laura Santos, founder of Rethink Relief, a yearly design collaboration of different kind of stakeholders, all in that field of humanitarian aid. And from one of the papers she wrote, I found a quote saying, collaboration and design thinking tools can empower the humanitarian sector to identify opportunities for innovation and create a shared vision for more sustainable and efficient aid. And last but not least, we have Grace K.G. She's a former teacher and journalist in a refugee camp in Kenya. And what she said was instead of investing so much or thinking so much about investing in the refugee camp, invests in the capacity of the refugees, which meaning in the people. I would like my four panelists to have the opportunity to give a few statements in the beginning and I would love for Kylian to start. So around that topic of innovation in refugee camps. We have to change the paradigm completely. Rethinking refugees as a theme is very paramount to this. We see and look at refugees as victims, as poor little things we have to assist and give charity to. And in that consequence, we consider that refugee camps, and let's just recall that only 10% of the world's refugees are actually living in camps. That refugee camps are just survival stations where people are kept alive, stored away until eventually they go back. That is sort of the way of how we look at camps. Instead of looking at camps as a place where change can take place, where new impulses must be set, where there is actually access to new life and opportunities eventually. And besides, again, we need to look at all the populations even in other agglomerations and I would also dare to say that in fact most slums of this world are refugee camps. Thank you. So I'm a management researcher and the angle that I bring to this is a management perspective. And what I'm interested in is that we continue to manage and approach refugee camps in the same way that we have for the past 40 to 50 years. But all the variables have changed. Camps are no longer temporary spaces. As we heard in the introduction, the average stay in a camp is 17 years. The camp that I study, which is the Dab refugee camp in Kenya, has existed for 24 years. And so what I think about is what are the opportunities to update the way we manage camps? Refugees have started updating, have started innovating, are building markets and are building a city inside of the camp. They're informal schools, they're informal courts, they're informal police forces, they're markets. You can buy anything you want in a camp. So where does humanitarian aid come in? How does that change the role of camp management? And I'm looking forward to discussing a lot of those opportunities with you today. Thank you. Hello. My name is Anna Laura. I'm in my perspective, in that sense, is the perspective of innovation. I've started a group which works together with humanitarian organizations, social workers on the ground, beneficiaries of that aid, so the refugees themselves, and development organizations. I try to really bring them all together to discuss something that is actually a very high level political discussion to a very common ground, which is through design, through building tools together, making decisions together in the sense that that would empower them to also make decisions at a higher level together. It has its challenges, of course. But my perspective in this and from that experience is that refugee camps should remain temporary. They should, I mean, you know, that things happen while people are there is not an excuse for us to not build the bridges and so set the innovation to do the journey of the refugees rather than that one stage of their journey. My name is Grace Keji. I actually lived as a refugee in Kakuma. My family fled to Kenya in 1989, so I lived in Kenya for quite a while. My perspective on the refugee situation is that there are tensions between what a refugee is and what they need. So we find tensions between the short-term nature of the interventions that organizations and governments tend to have versus the reality that the refugee camps actually exist for a very long time. Kakuma refugee camp is now about 25 years old. We have a generation that was born in Kakuma that is still there until now. So we tend to look at refugees as temporary and not our problem. Most countries have, like in the example of Kenya, we have three solutions to refugees which is resettlement, repatriation and reintegration. Very rarely do countries integrate refugees into their communities. So in Kenya, most of the time, with the Somali and South Sudanese refugees, they are repatriated to their countries voluntarily or resettled to countries in the West. So what happens is there is not much of an investment in the refugees themselves. And when we talk about innovation in the camp, it's usually people who have previous experiences from where they come from. So this whole generation that was probably born when the refugee camp started or when parents moved to the refugee camp, we have someone who is 25 years old right now that does not have that kind of investment put in them. So what does that person do after this? How have they been empowered? So we need to empower this upcoming generation in ICT. And that means empowering the structures that are already there in terms of education and putting in spaces for creative input from the refugees themselves as opposed to bringing in programs where there's a director telling you, okay, I want you to do that. You want to do maybe an art project, and this is what I want you to make. Why don't you give them that space and say, okay, do what you want to do and allow them to respond to their needs creatively. Great. Thank you. So I would like to start. So also our audience has a common ground where we can start from. You all mentioned different kind of challenges. So maybe you can pick your three challenges, each one of you. Let's see if there's... I heard some kind of similar statements, but maybe we also have some controversy here. So Kilian, what are your top three challenges that refugee camps and people in the refugee camps are facing at the moment? I'm burning to talk about Kakuma camp because... You don't have to talk about that, Free. You can also talk about... No, I can talk about Kakuma camp because I came across the border from southern Sudan with 20,000 Sudanese in 1992. And we had to build a camp and that camp was called Kakuma. So I was the first field officer in a camp which was established in summer 1992. That's why I used to work for UNHCR. The camp hasn't moved in the sense of changing technologies or changing infrastructure. It has grown from 20,000 to 180,000 people. In fact, 60,000 local Turkana people, more or less, if you want, integrated into the camp because it provided livelihoods to them. And I remember when I was there in 1992, staking out the camp, there was nobody. There were three families living in that area. Now it's 60,000 non-refugees living off the camp. So I'm arguing, and I think we have a little difference there. I'm arguing that there is absolutely no reason that a camp is not developed as a refugee city, as a settlement. It doesn't matter of how long a place stays, but you have to apply the rules and the methodologies we have in terms of urban planning, development, social design, and so on and so forth. So would you say that the challenges you saw back then are still the same today? The challenges, I mean, there is a place which was created in 1992, it's still there. It still functions the same. My son was trying to fix, my son, who is now 20-something, fixing the same water systems that he was establishing back in 1992. I mean, it's ridiculous. So we need to invest from a moment when we recognize people stay somewhere and really and making them to real, real living spaces. No matter, one day hopefully they disappear, but it doesn't mean a city is something bad. DADAB, we made it a project, we called it in 2011, the project DADABIA, the city of DADABIA. These are huge economies which we should be actually planning into a broader framework of the local area. So it seems like you're daring to answer to that? Yes, I think there's one important distinction that is necessary to do at all of these conversations and that's what kind of refugee camp we're talking about, who are the refugees, because there's many differences. I mean, DADAB, the camps in Jordan are different than open, smaller settlements in Uganda, for example, where we are working. And what we see there, having worked with refugees on their actually refugee journey, is much more that there's no innovation or planning on the return. And so, of course, nothing changes because back in the camp it's much better than in our villages where things are still destroyed, there's no water infrastructure, no sanitation. And so, there's a reason for that. So when you, for example, talk about innovation in a camp, so what would you say, what's the innovative part? We were talking about the resettlement, that's infrastructure, but more maybe also a policy topic. So when you talk about innovation, what do you mean? So I think to tie this back to the, because you were asking about challenges, I think the major challenge is the switch that needs to happen between when refugees first arrive and our vulnerable victims are traumatized or injured or malnourished and require immediate assistance. So the switch from that kind of temporary victim to the longer term when people actually stay, when the situation is a little more complicated, when war doesn't just end in a year or two, or when whole countries are destroyed and even when war has ended, people go back to nothing. And I think it's that switch that we're not doing. We just kind of keep managing camps as if they were temporary after a decade, after two decades, after we all know it's kind of ridiculous. And I think this is where there's an opportunity for innovation. Now, refugees have started innovating, right? They're the ones who wait every day and who spend those 20 years, those 30 years in the camp. There are huge markets. The annual turnover in DADD is around 25 million US dollars. And yet there's kind of the challenges like how do you regulate this informal financial market? How do you let refugees have a say in the actual aid that's distributed to them and the programs that you run and how you manage the city? How do you relate the camp to the host community? And also how do you relate refugees back to their countries of origin? So one very concrete example, speaking and working with a lot of business owners in the DADD refugee camps, they've told me, I would go back to my home country if I could start transitioning the life I have built for myself in the last 20 years back to Somalia, back to wherever they've come from. But that's not possible. It's either you're in the camp and you're a refugee or you decide to leave and you're kind of on your own, back and forth. We haven't really found a framework for that. And I think that's really where the opportunities are to innovate and to rethink humanitarian aid. Kim? I mean, one of the points, I mean, you're talking about return, to return to what? People change. And we also do not reflect on all our policies, return policies. And I've had to do a number of return programs in my life. It's supposed to be something positive. But even those, we're messing them up because we're forcing people to return exactly to the same place where they came from. People are changing. People are urbanizing. People are not the same anymore. If they have lived suddenly with 20,000, 100,000 people together. And so we're not reflecting on that. We did this mistake in Bosnia. We did it in Afghanistan. We do it everywhere. That's our dogma, you return where you come from. So we're keeping people really from for 20 years exactly at the same level. And this is how everything is going. Just to say in terms of now innovation, what means innovation? I mean, first of all, for me, innovation means to have a totally different look at this. It also means moving away from that whole thinking that because it's a refugee situation, there has to be humanitarian organizations taking care of people. These are people. It's not a disease to be a refugee. You're still a human being. So let proper people take care of this. Whether it's the private sector, whether it's, and we worked in Jordan a lot with the city of Amsterdam, for instance, as a partner with real specialized entities which know much better. Have the people themselves do their own clubs, don't wait for an NGO to play soccer with you. I mean, they can play soccer alone and can set up a club. That is innovation. So you were also teaching in the refugee camps. Because all of you mentioned that perspective, that at the moment a lot of refugee camps are focusing on, I would call it maybe crisis response, what you were saying, like, okay, somebody comes and is traumatized or hurt or whatever. It's pretty obvious what there is to do. But people develop. You were saying people are changing. So education is one very important aspect, not only for children. I believe you were a primary school teacher. But maybe your thoughts on one thing is to keep educating people. Children are one thing. But what's also happening with all the other ones who might be able to use that time, no matter if they are students and university afterwards, to actually have a life and a situation to return to. One of the things I used to do when I lived in the camp, I used to love going to the library. But it was very outdated. The books were old. Some pages were missing. Sometimes I'd have to reread books that had already gone through because we didn't have an extensive library. And in terms of the students that I was teaching, they face a lot of challenges. Last year, I went back to the camp in August. I volunteered as a girls' education advocate for this project called KIP, which is the Kenya Equity in Education Project. And a lot of interventions have been put in place. But one of the gaps that kept on coming up as a theme was lack of the girls, especially having that support to get into the sciences and the technology. You would find a student who maybe scored a B plus in physics, and they got an A in history or religion. And the teacher tells them, we need you to take history because that's what you perform better in. But what the student is dreaming of being is a doctor. So they need that kind of mentorship and support and also an innovation hub. Because before the government has outlawed having any kind of holiday programs. So what happens is the schools have after-club activities, which one of the things that the project did was support what they were doing. So there's a school called Kakuma Refugee Secondary School, which has a science club. And they have this project that they would like to implement, which uses the waste from the toilets, from the plattering toilets to generate biogas. That's very innovative. But what happens during the holiday season when they are no longer in class? What do they do with their time during that period? Where do they go and meet to innovate, to be creative by themselves? That's what's missing. And the gender divide, of course, there needs to be a lot of support for women to be part of the science-based subjects so that as they grow, they also identify their interests and they are not afraid to explore. So innovation and the whole field of education when it comes to primary but also secondary education is one thing that I hear. And another range of education I want to tackle is that, of course, also grown-ups can keep on learning. So you guys are focusing on entrepreneurship, for example, and maybe you can comment on that, what it means to become an entrepreneur and how this can be taught. And maybe Kylian can afterwards comment on, I met some people in Jordan when I was there that you were also working with the people from 3D Mina who were doing a project in the satire camp in the fab lab and the maker context and space and, for example, teaching refugees how to use 3D printers and one of them, I think he's, I don't know if he's speaking today, who was manufacturing his own prosthetics. So that's also one way of training not only children but also grown-ups who are also eager to learn. But maybe you can start with the entrepreneurship part. Sure, so how we are doing innovation and how we're doing this training on entrepreneurship on capacities is really to do a lot with the bridges that you can build with the organizations that are in place, with the host populations that are in place. And amongst adult populations, you also see a very, very large gender divide in which who are the innovators that are available for you when you set up a workshop. Those are mostly men. So we're trying to break through some of those barriers. And that's, I mean, when you take an inclusive lenses, then there's not only gender issues but also a lot of other divides amongst the population which include religions, handicapped people, et cetera. So we're trying to keep the lenses onto that. When giving people the spaces, providing the spaces to create and the capabilities in the sense you're trying to convince people of their sense of identity, allow them to have the space to create that, to identify themselves. But there is a challenge on keeping things running when you leave. So one of the key things that we've done is to set up a parallel train the trainers system which allows this to be done. So you need many fronts of innovation. You need not only the moments you're there working with people, you need to give it continuity but also bring it to outside partners, bring those ideas out. The fact is many of the solutions that we've come up with and the refugees have come up with now are rarely scalable in any way and that's still a challenge. So by engaging with organizations that are on the ground, we try to provide them with a reason why, how to be more responsive to the refugee needs. Well, I mean, to say, and now we're going back to the esatary camp in Jordan which has become an example of how people took their lives in their own hands. They're basically maybe with very violent means in the beginning kicked out the aid agencies basically from doing anything sensible in the camp because they said you don't know who we are and what we want, we do it ourselves. So they redesigned the space, they redesigned their homes, they redesigned the way our way of how you go to the toilet, they redesigned the way of how you cook, they basically changed the entire way of looking at things. All what they needed was electricity which they stole from the public lighting because we didn't think it was necessary for anybody to have electricity. So they just took it and they basically created their own maker space in that sense with anything they could find recycling to the extent that anything was recycled into something else. They needed welding machines, they needed a few tools which they somehow managed to get in. So they didn't wait for anybody. And a beautiful example was when the city of Amsterdam wanted to donate bicycles which eventually came one and a half years later. They made their own bicycles, they made their own e-bikes, they made actually also after a while discovered that on a horse cart you just put an engine and then it becomes a car so they built their own cars. So what I'm trying to say here is that, I mean we're taking really because we have that association refugee equal something as I said before like a disease or something totally inable and incapable, they have no clue what's going on in the world. They know very well and there are people and this is what I think is needed who are extremely active. They know, they use social media, they have access to tech, they're coming out of societies which partially already had jumped into the next let's say century or millennium or whatever you want to call it. They need actually access to some tools and they're becoming back to what 3D means that refugee open ware is doing with having them access 3D printers, laser cutters and other things. We're having now, but it's still complicated because the Jordanian government is not permitting this inside of the camp in a man doing coding classes, there's a reboot camp going on. I mean it's basically building up on what people already know and so basically out of that they're creating their own designs, they don't wait for us to tell them what they need but they need the ways and means to do this and that's where we can all work together and this is my big point, it's not giving, it's working together and trying to figure out of how we can all transfer maybe some of the tools and the knowledge we have across. So we're not only talking about technological innovation but also social innovation if we'd say for example that the self-organization of a camp can for example also be innovation though it doesn't have to do anything with IT but it's a kind of way how people work together and how they live together. Again, we're having this approach, somebody innovates something for you and that's also with due respect to the colleagues, my former colleagues in the aid agencies, every aid agency has an innovation department. They're innovating something for the people, not the people themselves innovate, that's the point, that's the real true innovation, that's changing the whole way of we move away from us and them. We are the rich, intelligent, technology aware people and we are transferring something down there to the poor little people who we think also have a right to land eventually in the 21st century. They have landed there already, they are living with the consequences of our conflicts, they know exactly what's going on, it's just a question of having them again access and to be treated like normal human beings. No? I absolutely agree that we do have a common ground. I do think that giving the tools, giving the capacities to build things allows for many things to happen, although not in all the settings of refugees, but it doesn't make it easy to improve the health systems that are in place if they're not there, if they're not bridges for the local systems, the hosting countries that have the education systems in place, the welfare, the healthcare in place, then there is a huge gap between what you can do with a welding machine and what you can do to have access to the health clinic or to that information on family planning. Maybe if we come to the fact that you were mentioning at the beginning, refugee camp like only around about 10% of refugees live in a refugee camp, a lot of others live in the cities, but if we focus on the refugee camp now as a place that's kind of segregated from the rest, and you were mentioning like the hosting or welcoming countries, so what about innovation in this field of the hosting country interacting with those people who came who are staying in the camps now, any thoughts on how we can open up that link and how to innovate in that field? Absolutely, by building those bridges, that's what I was arguing for, because with the involvement in the decision making together, this is... Hello? I'm sorry. Just building the bridges is absolutely essential in developing the tools and capacities to have a discussion on the table, doing it together. Do you have some examples? Any one of you where you try to open up that conversation? Look at Northern Iraq. It's a typical example. Look at the region of the hook. It has sort of a million people or something, nobody really knows, in addition to the local population. So the population is basically doubled. Some of them live in camps and some other don't live in camps. What does the region need? Those camps actually should become extensions of the cities in a way. That's the bridges you talk about. Don't treat them as something different. The mainstream, the municipal services in this, the municipal services are very poor. They're very weak. Now, let's look into how to work together on doing something with all the waste. The city of the hook used to produce 600 metric tons of waste a day. Now they have 2,100 tons of waste a day. Is that a humanitarian response? No. Do we divide between refugee waste and other waste? No. So it's really looking into an area where there are simply more people and maybe a different composition. There are needs in terms of housing, affordable housing. There needs in terms of water, energy, education, health systems, access to something. And then maybe transform. And that's where we're talking about refugees or migration becoming an access to opportunities. Use that as the trigger to jump ahead and actually improve systems. Use that as a trigger for true investment. And then again, true investment doesn't have to be only charity. We're also talking about money, investment, cooperation, all these other things. It doesn't have to be just a giving sort of operation. Maybe in response to what you're saying, communities that tend to have first experienced any type of development or improvement of their lifestyle, when it comes from a humanitarian agency, they don't understand what they need to demand from their government. Like in South Sudan, a survey was done and people were asked, what do you think the UN is responsible for and what is the government responsible for? Healthcare, education, and other types of development, people said, oh, it's the humanitarian agencies that are responsible for that. And then the government is responsible for security. So that kind of mindset brings about a situation where if the government can do the bare minimum, that's what it's going to do. Most refugee camps are located in very marginalized areas. In Kakuma, the refugees live much better than the host community. They actually employ the host community to do domestic work, to carry their food ratios from the distribution centers to their homesteads. So there's that kind of imbalance and what they demand from the government and what they think the UN should be doing for them, those are two very different kinds of things in their minds. So if the population is not sensitized as to what their government is responsible for, then it becomes very difficult for development to be coming from the government. That's why in terms of sustainability, if interventions in the refugee camp are not done in isolation to the host community, then that would bring about a more sustainable type of development even when camps are closed. If people are able to still remain in that area, then you can see visible transformation in the capabilities of the populations in those areas. So to come back to the link between host communities and the refugee camp, I think there are two layers that we have to think about. So on the one hand, there's the relationship between the refugee camp and the government. So we're talking kind of ministry level or department level. And then there's the interaction between the refugee camp and the people that immediately live around the camp, the host community. And in the dub, what's very interesting is that there are no formal borders. There's not a fence or a wall around the dub refugee camp. Actually the dub town and the dub refugee camp are relatively integrated. You can move freely as a refugee or non-refugee. Where there's a real border is beyond that. So as a refugee, I cannot move freely. In Kenya as a country, I cannot travel to Nairobi. But actually, the host community benefits massively from the camp being there. And the camp is a city, just to illustrate the dimension. There's 300,000 people living in the dub refugee camp. That's Pittsburgh in the US. That's the size of Nice and France. These are big cities in one of the most deprived regions of Kenya. And so the host community is integrated into this kind of illicit market that's emerging in the camp. It benefits with around 14 million US dollars in turnover between host community and camp every year. Now, locally, people accept that this is kind of a city and it's there and it's not going to go away anytime soon. But at the government level, so if we go to Nairobi, the capital, there's no acknowledgement that this camp will sort of be there for the foreseeable future. We still plan in annual cycles in terms of management budgets. Refugees can't start work. They can't own property and they formally can't run businesses. So there's really two different layers and they're often very contradictory. And we think about the relationship between host country community and refugee camp. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, the aid community puts in something like 300 million dollars a year into one of the poorest areas of Kenya in this case. And yes, it's true. The government stops, the moment you start building something more durable, it stops. I remember I was deputy representative in Kenya for a while. We started building with bricks and then all the refugees started building with bricks and it was forbidden, of course, because again, because the logic they don't understand when it is an aid agency doing that. And the aid agencies are considered to have an agenda, an agenda to stay, not to go. And which is true. I mean, in Kenya, a good example, 20-something years, they have been there and they have been living there and working there. Nothing has changed. So governments will, of course, be very suspicious. So what I'm arguing for is put the right people across the table to negotiate a durable solution in the sense of setting up a durable, sustainable settlement which somehow flows together with the economy of the surroundings, which is now, by the way, interestingly happening in Jordan where the government is moving in the direction of accepting special economic development zones to be established between basically the camp of Al-Zatari and the city of Mafrak, which is also heavily impacted, as we say, by refugee presence. What is it for, is to creating a special economic development zone which creates jobs for anybody and it happens to have a lot of people available because they're refugees, but they're also local people who need jobs. And what is this done, and who is this done by? Certainly not UNHCR or UNDP or somebody like this. This is going to be done by investors, Syrian investors, Jordanian investors, international investors, and it's going to have some interface, hopefully, with some facilitation of trade with the European Union or something. That is the way forward. And that is what the Minister of Planning of Jordan will understand and he will say, yes, and he will not say, no, no, no, I don't trust you. And I remember having had that discussion with the Minister of Planning where he said, I don't trust you aid agencies because you come, you have a lot of money in the beginning. You do all sorts of things, but you leave us with unsustainable infrastructure with messy social systems which don't match with the systems we have, with the governance we have around. So we are in a mess when you have no money anymore. So putting somebody across the table who knows what they're talking about, I think that's the way forward. So aid agencies, first responders, and then let's talk business, basically. Okay, so before we open up the question round also to the audience, so you have a few more minutes to think about questions. I would like to summarize a little bit the different hurdles and barriers you mentioned, but also the different areas of innovation. So I heard a lot that barriers are in that field of policy and legislation. Quite often it's not within the camp or the knowledge of the people, in this case the refugees who don't know how to innovate, but it's more the barriers that are put in place from all different kind of stakeholders and also opening up the discussion between news and also new stakeholders and maybe rethinking the whole, let's say, aid system as it is today. So it seems a bit more like system innovation than so much like we need to find a new way of installing pipes, for example. But something I would like to ask before I open the questions is innovation is quite often linked with something connected to internet or technology. So one last question from my side, would you say that internet has become a necessity and what are the stakes on that, on the different experiences that you made, how is the connectivity, for example, and the access to telecommunication in the different areas where you worked in? If I can start on that one. 2013, in the Zattery camp, when Secretary John Kerry came, we were still discussing the quality of water and stuff like this. A year later, the big issue in any US delegation or any foreign delegation was visiting the camp was the speed of internet. And it was really a nuisance because it was either not available or too slow. So connectivity became a major issue for people because they were trading. So it was one thing, communication obviously is another one. And many more, besides social media, of course, but many more using new technologies if you want to educate themselves, to have access to the many tools we have today in terms of online learning and so on. So we really, once we moved out of the tent and container distribution panic, it was clear that was the real challenge. And people wanted that. And they said, now we're here, we have time, and you treat us like animals because we are not part of this 21st century. Yeah, I very much agree with that last statement. And I think a big question, I mean, in the UN, we talk about beneficiaries, right? We don't talk about people. And so maybe a little controversial here is really thinking about, well, are we looking at innovation here? Aren't people just being people? Aren't refugees just doing what any of us would do as well if we sat around in a camp for two decades? Wouldn't we also want a phone, being able to call our cousins and maybe parents in another country? Wouldn't we also just want to be part of the 21st century? And so I think there's kind of, because we think of refugees, you know, as not being people and we attach all these assumptions to what a refugee is, we are surprised when people don't just sit around as victims but actually go out and do stuff and change things and challenge a system that determines what they're supposed to be eating every single day. And so I think, you know, as you said, there's a lot of system innovation. There's an opportunity for system innovation. But really what we're seeing is people being people in the 21st century. And we can call that innovation or empowerment, like we can slap on a label, but that's, I think, effectively what it really is. And I think, like, understanding that helps to recognize the opportunities that lie in something like that. And there's one more agree here. Of course, there's a few to add. That's definitely true. Internet, although not one of, I mean, not the only asset that you need to consider as very important as absolutely a critical infrastructure, does break a lot of these constraints around the definition of a refugee, which is where I think innovation should also happen. I mean, let's redefine whether refugee, what does that mean, what does say does means, and can we not just change that in the view of what you say? You know, this is just people, everybody does the same. And yesterday in your panel, we saw that, you know, apps for refugees are not really, you know, what penetrates the best, but apps for people, right? Apps for people that are mobile that want to keep being mobile. So I do think it does help to break this barriers and to create a new definition of what that refugee is. In the case of KAKUMA, I would say to bring in infrastructure at a level where it would be highly impactful, that requires a lot of resources, a lot of money, and a lot of commitment. Now, in relation to what Kilian was referring to, I wanted to bring in this whole idea of what is an ecosystem and what is a more important ecosystem, I would say. Like in the case of the encampment policy in Kenya, KAKUMA right now has the 180,000 people as a result of people who are located in other areas of Kenya, refugees, they were all moved to KAKUMA. The explanation was environmental degradation in those other areas. But when we look at the environment, we tend to want to save then the ecosystem that has the green trees, the grass, and everything. But KAKUMA in itself is another ecosystem. It's quite fragile. So to bring all those people into that small space and strain those resources, that is not development friendly. So creation of other zones where people can go and contribute and develop and put less strain on the areas where they settle in, that's very important. And right now we have a university branch that has been established in KAKUMA. Masinde Molliro, they had a class that graduated in 2013. Some of them, I'm sorry, in 2015 March, sorry, 2016 March this year. And I worked with some of them and it's had an impact on them. So it's bringing the resources to the people also right now. But in a long-term kind of plan, it would be important to have people taken to where the resources are while. So there's going to be a push and a pull factor and building up in both areas. And Nokilean wants to comment, but I'm sure that a lot of you guys might also like to have questions where you can then put in your comment. So anyone out there who wants to ask a question to anyone of the panelists on what we've discussed so far? Do I see any hands? Oh yeah, there's the long blonde here. Maybe you can stand up please. Hello, do you hear me? Yes. Okay. So the question comes from the area how you facilitate this bridging of the gap. Malin you were talking about, okay, for one there is the system innovation, but then also people being people. What I'm interested in, do you have observations you or the other panelists where people were relating to refugees and the host communities relating to each other? In which moments that happened and how one can facilitate that? I think that's a really good question. I think the link, so you're asking about the link between host communities and people in the camps and like how you can facilitate that. So that's happening every day on a massive scale already. Any vegetable stand will buy their vegetables from someone in the host community, right? Like any goods that come into the camp that aren't eight items that are being sold come from the host community in some way. So there are huge kind of informal channels of supply and demand and back and forth. I think the real question is it's all illegal, at least in most camps to kind of the largest extent, how do you formalize that? Like how do you regulate something that's really illegal without kind of challenging the whole system of camp management? And so I think the opportunity is really like why don't we just let refugees decide how they want to live in their homes, meaning in their camps. So I think one way forward in terms of system innovation would be to really create formal channels for refugees to partake in planning, partake in management at a higher level than they currently do. Yep. I mean as long as you don't treat the refugees as something airdropped from heaven and then suddenly in the middle of, I mean as long as you mainstream, as long as you allow people to have the same normal and quote unquote systems as the people around, you have no difference. You have that connectivity which goes, whether it's through sports, whether it's the business, which is a very, very important aspect. Trading is very common as one of the points. I'm sure again in Kakuma there has been a lot of other interaction, there have been the marriages. I mean there's a lot of this happening. So as such it grows together very naturally. But again it's quite often ourselves who actually prevent people from being treated like others. And that's my comment from before. Because we're treating these refugee camps as something where everybody gets everything for free. It starts with that. I mean 50 meters outside you have to pay eventually for your electricity, for your water. It's very difficult to get it. Then you will get it for free. So when we try to introduce the concept of you pay for your electricity, we even suggested to put in smart meters so that people could actually buy credit with smart cards and other things. First of all it wasn't understood by the aid agencies. They said these are refugees, they can't pay. They said but outside there are hundreds of thousands of people, they also pay for their services. Why they shouldn't be able to pay in here? And we subsidized the ones who needed. That was not understood. So we are creating an artificial barrier with any moment in between us and people simply because they're refugees. And that's where we have to really move away completely. Hold them accountable from day one. So there's another question up front and then third row. My name is Mona Reed and I live in Wiesbaden just across the road from a refugee camp. I have some first-hand experiences with teaching German and also what it is like to, well, as a host community member to come into a refugee camp. So first of all I think there's a real dilemma of how our perception, the popular perception of refugees, because trying to fundraise for projects, the campaigns obviously use images of refugees that are, we all know what I'm talking about. It's not an image which is related to the reality of refugees. As you say, they use mobile phones. They're not any different than we are. So... You have a question or more of a statement? Yeah, well, I was wondering if we talk about innovation, if we have to rethink also the way we are campaigning. Can you hand the microphone for our last question? Rafi, please. Hello, my name is Rafi. Before my question, just like for who didn't know about camp called Yarmouk in Damascus, it's like a Palestinian camp for... And it's a very good example for how it's the refugee camp. It's a good thing. It's like a life process. So in the 50s, this camp, it's a lot of Palestinian people. They decide to... Now they are in Damascus. They decide to be like a team. We're going to live here. So it starts from 10th and in the 90s and 2000, it became the biggest neighborhood in Damascus. And like it's very... Like, even there is a lot of Syrian, they're living in the camp. It became very good city there. It became big city. And yeah, my question is why Europe, like any camp, why didn't... Let's go let the camp here develop. How to be a stage, to be a city. Why the budget like in camps with the security and food and controlling. Thank you. Can anyone answer that? I think it's again... I didn't understand the last bit, you're talking about Germany or... So the question was why are we setting up camps in the way we do, meaning like having someone providing the food, having security. Why do we create that special place? In Europe. I mean, first of all, I think to your point on Yarmouk, I mean, it's a perfect example for the many settlements in the world, whether these are the Afghan settlements in Pakistan or whether it's in the western Sahara, in many, many places camps have developed and transformed into more permanent settlements and you can't even see the difference. However, just a very interesting point. As we were working with the city of Amsterdam city planners, looking and comparing of how those settlements had evolved and how in that case, a Zatory camp was evolving, we discovered that there are, that you can still see today in the Palestinian camps, the way of how the first tents were pitched up. And that in terms of city planning makes no sense. So these are in fact settlements which are very ineffective when you talk about infrastructure and other things when basic principles of city planning have never been applied. This is what a city planner will tell you. Why don't we do this here in Europe? Because in Europe, we have frankly speaking no problem with refugees because we only got a million or so. So what's the problem? So in that sense, we don't need or we shouldn't need to set up any camps and people, and anyway the idea is that people live amongst the population and that gets more into the questions of modern planning, avoiding any sort of ethnic neighborhoods and things like that. This is a totally different ballgame. But when you have suddenly a million people in northern Iraq and somewhere, yes, you will end up in setting up camps as new settlements. And this is what I, at least I argue, the moment they come, they should set up new settlements as by the way Syria has done for the Iraqi refugees when they came to Syria. There were thousands and thousands of apartments built for them. Okay. Thank you very much. So I would like to ask Mr. Prashant on stage now who is from the GIZ to summarize what we've talked about so far. I'm sure if anyone else has any questions, the panelists will be here afterwards. And one last hint, which was mentioned before, the conference on the 31st of May, the ICT for refugees focusing very much on the technological part. And today also happening is the Refugee Car, which is a little bit of a sub-conference attract here. So if you want to interact also a little bit more with those people who we were just talking about and maybe asking the questions, not only the experts, but also those people who are affected by it, then I highly recommend that you go there. And Mr. Prashant, please. Can I have the microphone? Thank you. Thank you very much. I think it's a great pleasure for me to say that there was a lot of agreement and little controversy here on the panel, though for a moderator I think the other way around would have been better. But this happens. I found first of all very interesting what Mrs. Bornehmann said at the beginning, that Germany has a very special role in all refugee questions because we have a special memory of refugee crisis and that Germany has been responsible in the last century for two of the really huge refugee crisis after the First World War and after the Second World War. And perhaps this is also one of the explanations why the German government takes now stands towards refugees slightly different from what other governments do. I observed a very strong agreement here on the panel that we are observing a change of paradigm. Change of paradigm from considering refugees as helpless beneficiaries to persons, to individuals. But though it was not said so explicitly, this is a change of paradigm which our panel sees and which maybe you see, but what aid agencies don't really understand to the necessary extent and the activities and the actions of many aid agencies still follow the old role of treating the people rather as beneficiaries and not as people who want to create their own environment who are innovative, who have ideas and that the role of aid agencies should much rather be helping the refugees to do what they want and not implement and execute their plans. Actually, I would very much like to add that the same attitude of treating refugees rather as beneficiaries also can be strongly observed in Germany. I read recently in the neighboring town of where I live that on Monday a group of 500 refugees were expected and some very active citizens were working throughout the weekend to have everything prepared when the refugees arrived and I thought, why do you do it for them and why don't you give the arriving refugees the chance to prepare their own beds, to prepare their own spaces and so I think we are not only talking about all the new attitudes in the Near East countries for instance, but also in our own country. There was one controversy and I found it a very interesting one with regard to the question should we rather think of converting refugee camps into permanent or semi-permanent settlements in the future or is it also a very comfortable concept for governments in order not to prepare for the returning of their refugees into their home countries, not to look into the spaces where they came from, not to invest into the original villages. I think this is a very interesting controversy though when we talk about different refugee camps I think we would find a different solution for each of the camps. What we didn't talk a lot about is what could we do to help refugees, to enable refugees to create their own productive environment, to create work spaces in the camps. We talked a little bit about education, we talked very little about health and I think especially since we are here in the Republika for all these three sectors, health, education and creation of employment, really digital approaches should play a much stronger role than they are playing right now and I think also the German Development Corporation is still learning after right at the beginning to care for good water and good food and good shelter now to improve connectivity and see what is really the option and the opportunities to work through digitalization to enable the refugees to improve their situation. Thank you very much, I found it a very enlightening and interesting discussion. Thank you. Some very last words from us from the Ministry. When I was preparing my words I wanted you to go out of this room and to have actually two things in mind. This one, the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development takes the refugee crisis very, very seriously and the second one is we believe in ICT and innovation to ease the repercussions of this crisis but there is one thing that I learned in the panel that I find so important so that I really like to say that at the end is what Kilian said is I think what can we do as the audience, what can you do? Use your tech skills, get engaged, get involved, talk to the NGOs or as you do work in your neighborhood, talk to us but it is super important I believe that we need this mind change as Kilian said and we have to stop seeing refugees as victims as threats even worse but see them as innovators, change agents and development workers. So thank you all very much for this panel. Talk to us and enjoy Republika. Thank you very much.
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Refugee camps are often viewed as temporary refuges for people fleeing war and violence. However, due to conflicts and refugee situations becoming ever more protracted, refugee camps also become permanent or semi-permanent homes and have developed into towns and cities of their own in many cases. This session, convened by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), will look at the economics of refugee camps and highlight examples of innovation in the most unlikely settings.
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10.5446/20836 (DOI)
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Hi, everybody. I first want to thank the conference presenters for inviting me here. I'm really excited to be in Berlin and particularly excited yesterday to see May Day, which is all the activities. How, you know, why did everybody come? Who thinks they're the farthest that came here today? Berlin people? Anyone from the US? Anyone? Boston. Okay, you come from where I come from. It's far. So today I want to talk about how we hear that the rise of big data is going to change the world that we live in. But I think that big data will not change the world unless it's collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit. I run something called the Civic Data Design Lab. And at my research lab, we take data, something that looks like this, a spreadsheet, and translate it into visualizations that we hope expose and affect policy issues. So I like to use this example. This project I worked on with Laura Kurgan, where we took incarceration data, the places where people lived before they were put in prison. We added it up block by block and found there are many blocks in the US where over a million dollars is spent to incarcerate people. These 17 blocks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, almost 17 million dollars was spent to incarcerate people from these blocks. But little money was allocated to the types of resources that would alleviate them from going to prison. So these are things like job training programs, reentry programs. And the idea was to visualize this data and bring it to broader publics. These maps ended up in the Museum of Modern Art. It's paired with a map that shows where all those resources are going to prisons upstate in New York. And I think one of the things that's interesting about this particular project is this idea of bringing it to people so they can use it in the way that they want to use it. And so actually a congressman saw this map in the Museum of Modern Art and used it in his presentation to Congress to work on the Criminal Justice Reinvestment Act of 2010. So he asked if he could borrow some of our images for his presentation. And obviously our maps did not have the results, but we affected a politician in allocating 25 million dollars to reentry programs in the U.S. which would help people returning home from prison. So the idea that visualizations and bringing them to broader publics can activate a kind of change. So I think we've heard a lot today about how data visualization and data can be harmful to our privacy. But data can also be used for public goods. So I think it can be used for both sides of the force, good and evil. I think I try to work on the side of Yoda and bring us data visualizations that have a public good. In my lab I make three calls. I think we need to have a call for data literacy. More open data means we have more access to it. But that doesn't necessarily mean we have people who are literate to use that data. I also think we need to make a call for new data visualization and collection tools in order for us to tell our own stories from our community perspective. We need to create tools from that perspective in order to tell governments about our needs. And three, I think we need private data for a public good. Something like 80% of the data now stored is owned by private organizations but has a possible public benefit. Today what I want to talk to you about is number two. New data visualization and collection tools. And I think data tools for policy development can be really impactful. They allow citizens to collect data outside the formal channels of government and really tell their own story. So I'm going to tell a story about one of my data collection projects. It's called Digital Matatuz. It's a partnership with the computing and informatics department at University of Nairobi, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University, my research lab at MIT, and it's funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. And it started from this premise that Nairobi suffers from severe congestion problems. And this is a very typical scene on the streets of Nairobi, traffic jams. And this is an issue in many of our fast-developing cities across the world. I've been working in Nairobi for some time. Actually, I created one of the first GIS data sets for Nairobi looking at issues around transportation and congestion. We created a transportation model which you can see here, which looks a congestion along the roadway. We also created a density map for that model. But one of the biggest issues as we were kind of trying to think about how we plan and redirect traffic in Nairobi is we did not have information on Matatuz. These are the small vans that 3.5 million people in Nairobi depend upon to get around the city. And to get, I'm just going to give you a little video of what a Matatuz is, just in case you don't know. Which nowadays is more like 30 cents. The fares are raised by the conductors. So Matatuz are something that everybody in Nairobi loves to hate, just like most public transport. It's the top of a conversation. And to get a Matatuz, you simply have to register it in the government and then have somebody make you a sign. This is actually a Matatuz sign driver in Cabera. The number 8 goes through Cabera. But the system is hard to navigate. We didn't know where it was and how to add it to our model. We went to city council and this was the best data set that we could find. Mind you, there's 132 Matatuz routes. These were the routes that we found in city council. Clearly not 132. So we thought how can we create raw data for our model to create better transportation planning in Nairobi, but that create data that everyone can access and use and benefit from. Nairobi uses cell phones for almost everything. And one example of that is something called M-Pesa. You can buy coffee with M-Pesa. You can even buy a Matatuz ride with M-Pesa. It's like your credit card. It sends cell phone minutes for cash. And we thought how can we leverage the ubiquitous nature of cell phone use in Nairobi, Kenya, to capture data about the informal transit systems, which most citizens depend upon and open that data for anyone to use and build upon. We developed an app which we wrote on, used on Matatuz. And we collected data in something called GTFS. Has anybody heard of GTFS? One person that's more than most times that I ask that question. We, you probably all use GTFS today in order to find your way in public transport on Google Maps. The underlying data structure is GTFS. So you use GTFS all the time and it allows us to perform routing. And it's a, many open source software products are built on this system. So we decided to collect data in this system so that anybody could benefit from the many open source tools that use this package for transportation and routing. So what does GTF actually look like? Here is GTFS coming into our data stream. It really is just a unique identifier. It has information about the latitude and longitude of stops. It has information about routes. And as you put it together, it begins, and as the data was coming in, it creates a map. And here is the map that we began to create of Nairobi's Matatu system. And one of the things that you can see here is we collected data on stops, both informal and then these blue, which are in, sorry, formal is orange and informal is blue. And this was very important for our model. But one of the issues we had is when you look at this, it's hard to read. It's not accessible to everyone. It looks simply like the roadway. So we started to play around with how can we translate this into something that people in Nairobi could read, could understand. We began to, this is the Thika road routes. You can see there's 10 different routes that kind of splinter off. How can we make sense of this data? We began to create a legend. We played around with colors. And ultimately, we began to have something like this. But it was still quite hard to understand. And so we decided to stylize it in a style very similar to something that you would see in the London subway system, or Paris, or even Berlin, New York, and create a stylized map of Nairobi's Matatu's. And we did this for a very important reason. We wanted to make a point about how extensive the system was. It's comparable to other global cities. We wanted people in Nairobi to feel proud about their Matatu system. But we also wanted the government to feel proud about the system as well. We used methods in which to create the system that were very important in Nairobi. The stops that you see here are landmarks. In Nairobi, they use landmarks to get around the city. So you see that we didn't have all the stops that we collected originally in the dataset, but we created strategic stops in order for people to read the maps themselves. Ultimately, we created a map of the whole system, which you can see here. But one of the things that was really important to this data collection project is that we asked people in Nairobi what they thought of the maps. And they helped us actually build this dataset. So what you're seeing right here are the Matatu drivers helping edit our map. And one of the things that's very clear in this particular video is the lack of routes in the north of the city. And the Matatu drivers instantly began to edit the map and think about new routes that they could add in that area. And so one of the important things about being able to visualize this particular dataset is that we could create a planning tool that is not just something that's used in data and models, but a planning tool that everybody in Nairobi can access and use. And so the Matatu drivers were very excited to use this map. And I think that's one of the important things about any data project is it shouldn't just be something that you do in the isolation. We included government stakeholders, NGOs, Matatu drivers and owners in the process all along. We invited them to join us in our data collection process. We held workshops. Now that doesn't mean that the government necessarily participated, but it does mean that they have buy-in. And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that in a second. But the other thing that we did, and this is actually us editing the map with a group of stakeholders and ultimately releasing this version of the map that included a matrix in the back which helps people better navigate their particular stop. We also held a hackathon. And this was really important because the data format GTFS is known to many people in the transportation field, but not everyone. And if we wanted the local tech community to build apps with it, they needed to know how to use this data standard. There are now five apps that use this data product. This is a sonar, which is a popular routing app in Nairobi, as well as something called Mothry route, which is also a very popular out in Nairobi, which people use it to route themselves, but also complain about traffic accidents and tell us about local conditions on the road. A crash or an accident can change dramatically your commute. It can take it from a half an hour to two hours. And so this app has become one of the biggest apps in Nairobi, which was started off of our data set. But I think one of the most interesting and exciting moments for us was when we got invited to a press conference by the government, where they told us this is the new official map of the city. This is them giving it to the governor of Nairobi. And I think why this is really important is because because we included the government in the data process, they felt okay acquiring the maps and making it the official map of the city. Even though they didn't necessarily participate in the data collection project, they could finally see the benefit and value to them. And they could trust the data because we were open about how we were creating it. The maps went viral once the government supported it. And one of the things that I like to talk about is how do you measure success in an open data project? And I think that's when others leverage the data we generate to create their own policy change. So here the government released the map. But since this time I've seen the map in many different locations. This is a meeting I saw in UN Habitat. You see the map at the top. And they use the data to analyze new commuter rail routes. And this is the ultimate route map for commuter rail. Looks very similar, doesn't it guys? Same colors even. Maybe the Fika Road route is orange. It's now the Simba route. But and I think what's really important about this is that visualization has an effect on public consciousness because the popularity of the digital Matatu maps was something that the UN Habitat wanted to leverage for their own change and getting people to support the commuter rail lines. Since the time of the map we've had many other cities ask us to help out and they've been doing this work on their own. Compose one, Acura's another one. They just completed their maps. I just heard the Dominican Republic just finished their own maps. There's also Groupon Aman. But also I'm really excited to say that in August Google made Nairobi the first informal transit system in Google Maps. So you can actually navigate the city of Nairobi and find out which Matatu you can take by searching on Google. So also I think this is a really interesting picture. It's us at the Google release but in the center is the head of the National Transportation Safety Association who was really excited that we released this data on Google Maps is now willing to share data with us. And I think opening up data allows you to receive data and then allows you to create more policy change because you can make more decisions with better data. So semi-formal transit provides mobility around the world and right now we're really interested in creating a resource network and almost open street map type system for creating GTFS data for these informal systems. Almost every day somebody calls me about whether I can do their own city and so one of the next steps in this project is to create a resource center and standard so that other people can do this work. All right so this is one data story in a very developing country context. I thought I would tell you about another data story in the US, a very different context and this is a project that I did in New York City which is looking at the garment district and the garment district is a district in New York City that has protected zoning. That means that people who manufacture in this district have decreased rents so where it might be $18 per square foot, the actual rent if let's say a lawyer had that office space would be 52 so they get huge protections for being in the garment district and you can understand why it's around all the major subway lines right near Times Square between the Port Authority bus station in the train station it's high value real estate and protection is important because fashion is really produced in the garment district. These are some of the factories and you can really see fashion on the street. So fashion designers were really up in arms by the potential rezoning. The city wanted to remove the zoning in the garment district and move it out into Long Island City and kind of further places the field and the fashion designers said it's this interworking of wholesalers, designers, retailers, manufacturers that make the district work. If you move the manufacturers out the industry will simply collapse. On the other hand, manufacturing in the United States has declined 81 percent since 1980. This is the same for New York City and the US and a lot of the landlords were arguing that really there is a lot of vacancy in this district. But one of the things that you can see is that the imperial industry is actually declining significantly and this is the first map shows 1994 but it's only being maintained in those areas that have protection. So that zip code in the last map and bottom have zoning protection for manufacturing. So it's shrinking back to its core the place that it's being supported and 79 percent of garment apparel work happens in this midtown Manhattan region. So you can see that there would be a huge effect of this multi-million dollar industry if it was moved out of the city. And here's a map showing all of the garment related industry work in and around the garment industry. And so I thought, how can we solve this debate? The city claims one thing, the landlords claim another, the fashion designers claim another. And how can we prove that really it's the proximity and interworking of the district itself that makes it successful. And so we started a project called industry emotion which uses smartphones to explore the manufacturing industry in the garment district. And so what we did is tracked 100 fashion designers for two week period where they collected data everywhere they went. And so this is actually an intern. They checked into four square and they also we were tracking them on their phone. We collected that data. That data went ultimately to a map. We signed up people through website through canvassing to get people all around the city. And this is the ultimate representation of that data. You can see a lot of people go to the garment center. But what does that mean? How do we quantify this? This is a great image that shows that there's lots of activity. But what do we do with that data to make sense of it? So we categorize things into different trips and then categorize the trips. So this is one of my favorite trips. A trip is when somebody leaves the studio and comes back. This person wants a venue which is a bead store. New York beads. Beads store funda beads. Beads store Taohoshu beads store beads world. One of the things this person was clearly doing was going out of their office getting beads and then coming back. And this is one of the things that they mentioned is being really important to a thriving garment industry is the ability to have access to the things that they produce and to do that in quick time. So we also mapped out all the locations that they went to. And one of the things the fashion designers was telling us is that 8th Avenue is the hub of manufacturing. And that's actually what you get from the data result. This yellow is all the manufacturing areas. And this is quite different from what we saw on the traditional business map that I showed you earlier. That business map showed things hugging Broadway. So when the city was going to rezone they want to lob off that 8th Avenue quarter. The fashion designers were saying no, no. 8th Avenue is more important. You should cut off Broadway. And this helped us to prove that information. The other thing that we found is that people inside the garment district those fashion designers that work inside it and those outside both benefit from the garment district. So they both make about the same amount of trips 101 minutes or about 150 minutes of trip time per day. But garment district designers can make nine trips so they can go out whenever they feel like it. But those outside can benefit it from it. They make four trips on average per day. So they come in, they chain their trips, and then they go out. So they benefit from this agglomeration economy. We also found that one of the comments that the city was making is that it's only small designers that really use the garment district. What you can see here is this yellow represents manufacturing. It's large and mid-level designers that are using it the most. And what they're doing is they're producing fashion that then gets sent all over the world to be produced. So when people talk about manufacturing being dead in New York City, what's not happening is these large runs that go into J Crew. What's actually happening is J Crew is producing the styles that then get sent all over the world in the garment district. And that's a huge industry. It's about a $31 billion industry in New York. So they would be seriously affected. So what happened? From this data analytics, we were able to shelve the rezoning. They actually modified the zoning to keep the 8th Avenue and to open up much of the quarter along Broadway. And it shows how data can be really informative and actionable in creating change in the district. So I say if data is the new infrastructure, we need to think about how we can use data as a public good. So just like we were building pipes at the turn of the last century, we are building data pipes at this time. And so many of the projects that I work on advocate for data literacy, this is a project that I work on with New York City public schools where we're using lottery data to understand probability. And more recently, we're looking at the issue of ghost cities. These are cities that are completely developed in China that nobody lives in. And we're able to identify those ghost cities using activity on social media. And so this is one of the ones that we've identified. So with that, I want to open it up for questions and really talk about how you might use data for public good in your city. Thank you. Thank you so much. Show us your hands if you have questions, please. There's one gentleman there in the middle. The one who knows GTFS, he was the one who knew. Now I'm putting on the spot. Hi. And my question is about GTFS. If you compare Nairobi with Germany, there are a lot of similarities about the data. The problem with Germany is that we do not have or almost no timetables in GTFS released under open data. In the whole Germany, with hundreds of transportation companies, we have around five to seven companies which publish GTFS data as open source. And you're absolutely right. You can do a lot of good things with that. But how do we persuade organizations to release their data so that we can use this data for the public good? What would be your arguments? Right. This is a very good question. And this was actually a huge issue in the US when we started to use GTFS. Because technically, the public organizations are very worried about opening this data up because they're afraid of getting sued for inaccuracies in the data. And we had a number of course cases in our legal system to allow it so that they would not get sued for some of the inaccuracy if it went up into Google. And so I think how do we ensure that we can have open data? In many ways, I think there's a lot of policies that still need to be developed to help protect those people who want to put their data up. So who's responsible if it's incorrect? It's one of the biggest concerns, I think, for some of these transport systems and why they're not putting the data. Another issue, I think, and one of the things that really helped push this forward in the US, so we had a lot of problems when we first started using GTFS. And it was really Obama created the open data law, which really said government agencies need to put up data. Any data that government agencies create data has to go up now. The MTA or other public transverts are not government agencies, but because they do receive funding from government, they do then have to put their data up into the system. Maybe one more right in the front. Up here? I think it's you. Thank you. Thank you very much for that speech and talk. You mentioned a lot about visualization and you played around with colors. How did you do that? Who's part of the team? What kind of disciplines are involved? And how about the question? I'm so glad you asked that question. I'm really glad you asked that question because I think to make data work, you really need to work with teams of people. In the Nairobi project, we had a team of people. I'm a data analyst, a data technician, but we also have graphic designers on our team working with us. It's not just graphic designers. I have policy experts. I think whenever you work on a particular project, you need to have somebody who specializes in that particular policy to help that team really guide its future. So the criminal justice project I showed at the beginning, we had criminal justice policy experts. In the Nairobi project, we had people, policy experts in transportation. Same with the zoning issues in New York. I think it really helps then figure out the best way to target your audience. But then also have a data analyst. So I usually have three people. My graphic person, my data analytics person, and my policy person, and then my person with local knowledge, which we had also in Nairobi. Sometimes I act as the graphic and data person, but it's nice to have two people on that team. The building teams to work with data is essential, and I would encourage it for all of you. Unless one hand goes up very quickly, that's all I think we have time for. Yes, on stage right now. I just want to say, I think this has been, it's so fabulous that you're here. I so enjoyed your talk. I know your map from walking into iHub and seeing it there. It was just great to have everything put into context here. I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that we actually have one of the founders, Jessica Colasso here. Evan is here from iHub and so is Nanjira. So people working in different corners of that organization, mostly hanging around at the gig macrospace. So this is really great also to, yeah. And I should say that iHub map is a different map from our map. They did a stylized version of that, which is beautiful, but I just want to make sure it's clear, especially since the iHub people are here. Okay, but still great to make that connection. And yeah, thanks so much for being with us. Hope you're going to be hanging out with us. Yes, I'll be hanging out. Love to answer questions. I see you around. Big round of applause to Sarah P.s. Thanks guys.
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Big data will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit. In this talk Sarah Williams will illustrate projects from her research lab, the Civic Data Design Lab @ MIT, that have transformed data into visualizations that have had an effect on policy reform.
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10.5446/21073 (DOI)
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It's my really, really great pleasure to announce the opening keynote of this year's Republic. In the program team, when we were thinking about how to open our 10th anniversary, who should speak first, we thought maybe it's a good idea to have somebody who's spoken of the past and can help us work with the motto and reflect on the last 10 years but also look ahead. So we started going through all the speakers that we had on this amazing stage and on of course the Swedish that part of stage in the last 10 years and we stopped at 2012. 2012 was a really important year for Republic. It was a year where we transitioned into this wonderful location to the station and really made that jump from having a location that allowed us to have that campus feeling to come together more strongly as a community and build this event. 2012 was also a very, very important opening keynote for us. We decided that we wanted to have a very strong political keynote after having ventured out into other topic areas in the past years. So we invited Eben Moghlin, the inventor of the Freedom Box, and thought he was the perfect choice for this opening keynote and he was. His keynote in 2012 included such legendary senses as the day Steve Jobs died was a good day, at which point at least half the room dropped their iPhones. Eben has been fighting for free and open software for over 20 years. For instance by defending free software developers such as Richard Storman and Philip Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP. Eben Moghlin is also the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center that offers licensing and legal support for free and open source projects. But when we were thinking about this keynote we thought okay but he shouldn't be alone and we feel that this is the absolute perfect combination. He will be joined today of the veteran by a Republican noob, somebody who's never spoken on our stage before, the most wonderful Mishie Kaldre. She's a technology lawyer and an online civil liberty activist who's also working at the Software Freedom Law Center together with Eben. Mishie is originally from India, the country that managed to take a really strong stand for net neutrality and shove internet.org against the wall last year and together they are here to examine the state of internet freedom in the world today. Please give a really really warm welcome and a huge applause to Eben Moghlin and Mishie Kaldre, the last kilometer, the last chance. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be back at Republica. I can't thank the organizers enough for the honor of starting out this 10th anniversary conference. I want also to thank the German Foreign Ministry for agreeing to give my law partner a four-day visa to enter Germany after demanding real-time access to her bank accounts in order to allow us to be here together today. So thank you to the government of this very Democratic Republic of Germany. By 2025 we will have wired up or wireless up the remaining half of the human race. This should be the greatest moment of educational liberation, the greatest moment of social justice making, the greatest economic opportunity in the history of humankind, but it won't be. Because the net we are making is a net that we don't want, a net of surveillance, data mining, and despotism. When you grow up in India there are a few things you cannot avoid, cricket, Bollywood, and some very good poetry. Growing up I read this poem where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way, into the dreary desert of dead habit where the mind is led forward by thee, into ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom my father let my country awake. Where the inventors of internet reading to gore is what I thought, but I was only naive and young and to find a cure I just started hanging out with smarter people like the one on this stage. The net that we are building now, the one that the rest of the human race will soon be caught in, is a net which watches us more than we watch it. Everything we do, everything we say, everything we buy, everything we search for is remembered forever and we are becoming the objects of experimentation. We are becoming the subject of the net to which we are joined. Our net now experiments with human behavior, giving a new way of thinking about the human race adjuncts to a machine which experiments with us, stimulus and response, stimulus and response. Billions of times a day an experiment is conducted on a human being, show us something, swipe left, swipe right, click, don't click, buy, don't buy. The machine is a behaviorist, like BF Skinner and the 20th century psychologists who followed him, the machine has no need for a concept of human mind. Only correlation, only mathematics, only the modeling and prediction of our behavior, everything we do, teaches the machine. By 2025, it won't be Scarlett Johansson taking your orders, but your favorite voice in your language, your personal customized chatbot which learns by crunching data. Balloons, playing loony tunes, would hover alongside drones, beaming the greatest opportunity for humankind, the net. Unparalleled troves of data will get collected and studied to make farming more productive and control the temperature in your living room, while your fridge refuses to put in an order for a pizza and sugar-rich ice cream. Siri or Cortana will ensure that you never have to look up and engage in that awkward activity, talk to another human being. Who runs the world, they say, apps. My augmented reality will have more tickers. I have a developing country passport, that's why. Swipe right, swipe left, click or think. Someone will anticipate all our needs and also be our shrink. By 2025, everything that is deemed basic by Silicon Valley would have been offered for free. My retina and fingerprints will ensure that cashless will also make me cost less and my Uber pool can have more people bent over screens as the driver seat is empty. The political economy of networking now dictates that it is cheap for the platform companies to move your packets for you in return for the ability to surveil them. Therefore, suddenly it is in the interest of the machine to give access to everyone, which really means to have access to every mind. Building out the net to embrace the other half of the human race poses itself as charity, but it's actually the perfection of spying. Access to the net belongs to everyone means we belong to everyone's mind and we are calculating everybody. To add another billion minds to experiment with for Facebook is cheaper than leaving them alone and so suddenly the net we do not want is the net we are supposed to wish on the other half of the world, a poor net for poor people. The World Bank thinks that around 70% of the bottom fifth of the population in developing countries has a feature phone. That feature phone is soon going to become the smartphone because right now it is very profitable to get those packets. We will create an enormous system of consumption where we all will be turned into nodes for further consumption. In exchange of my boring data, I'm gonna get security, convenience and a ton of services. Bad hair, good hair, don't care but perfect filters, primetime delivery and also the fun to ask Siri what does she think of Google or is a Yula commitment enough that I don't need a partner in my life. All this fun brought to you next door in your developing country free basics or basics all that are free. So the network we are building, the network we don't want, the network we struggled against, the one that deprives us of freedom of thought by operating on us while giving us the impression we operate on it, that network now controls the pace of the human mind. Our space is small, our room is little and our time is nonexistent. The greatest word of importance to the greatest of the platform companies nowadays as one of its executives was telling me last year is latency. But the latency they're talking about is not the time it takes for a human being to learn after the presentation of an idea. The latency they're talking about is not the years we spend growing up becoming something we've invented out of the machinery of freedom and the opportunity to learn the latency they're talking about is the milliseconds it takes for a smartphone to display an advertisement stimulus and response calculation of human possibility not by humans but by the machine. The calculating our computers do is not our thinking. The calculating our computers do is the prediction of us. This network which we're talking about this network is getting and giving what Silicon Valley designs it for but it isn't delivering the promise because it isn't promising honestly and the great problem with all this altruistic talk to get the next billion online or three billion online is an honesty problem. There hasn't been any candor about it anywhere and then the states show up and you certainly cannot expect any candor from them. This network is not delivering what it promises and it could just get lost by greed nationalism ill temper or just laziness. It doesn't mean that fishermen's incomes go up just because it exists. It does not mean that rural health care is better delivered or developed just because it's there. That's not a guarantee. What is guaranteed to occur is the rendering of ads on smartphones which get quicker, swifter, smarter and we're all being tied to this network which we don't understand the purpose or or the behavior of. What is happening with us is not what we want the promise to be delivered to us. We already imitate this machine or it imitates us. Remember the TAI bought by Microsoft? It recently got a crash course in racism, Holocaust denial, sexism, curtsy the Twitter users and that's what we are getting from the network as we talk about it. Four years ago I said here that freedom of the mind depends on freedom of the media which depends on free technology which depends on free hardware free software and free bandwidth. Here today ten years into Republic I tell you before we get to 20 time will have run out. We are no longer capable of building the net we want. We are only capable of resisting the net we do not want now. We lost our chance to do it right the first time. Now we are in the place where we must decide instead to hold off to resist to fight against the machine on behalf of the machine we need to struggle against the system that predicts us to become unpredictable enough that we can relieve the room for freedom of the mind or we lose our struggle forever. In at least 38 countries Facebook wants to provide free internet how do they want to provide it is by buying the packet movements from the telecom service providers and put them through their own proxy servers they can offer this way poor internet to the world's poor towards whom they have actually acquired quite an odd case of white man's burden as they tell us this in their own words. We stop them in India we stop them by telling the telecom regulator of India that breaking the security of the web eliminating authentication for poor people turning untrusted potentially dangerous net into trust us because we know it and we are only here to help who could be against it is not the route to universal connection to the Indian society but nobody's receding from here neither is Facebook nor other platform companies some of it is only a desire by a CEO who wants to do this but most of it is just this raw energy of the business right now right now let's get all of these people online because their data is what works for us. And then and then what happens to it once they've gathered it once Google AI has the data of tens of millions of people from the UK National Health Service what happens to it once we have taken our system of money and turned it into other people's bit streams what happens to it the mystery of the back end is becoming the mystery of human freedom have we lost it where is it where does it go instead of storing it ourselves we're allowing other people to store it for us and to whom do they give it everyone is so struck with the convenience of the front with the beauty of the top with that which lies above the waterline and of course there's nothing to see before the waterline move along nothing to see nothing to know nothing to guess because below the waterline it's all guessing about you. Did we all get told that this is going to increase democracy but we've also discovered that democratization of technology does not necessarily mean democratizing of the society itself what the net has democratized is the ability to self promote through Twitter through Instagram through Snapchat or any other new big app because the world is run by apps what has happened is the democratization of the ability to be surveilled or surveil but at the end of it what we have delivered is the advertisements to eyeballs but not autonomy to the society the promises of all this free speech and expression have also now met with an outpouring of the harassment and coercion of which the platform companies themselves are scared they're all now rushing to study this find out what is this online harassment and also find a solution a technical solution but really what it means is that we've empowered people to be ill-tempered who are constantly engaging in now making an actual opposition to the way things are so what we find is a lot of sentiments in the net lot of opposition people are using this form of social mobilization which is harassment of the net mostly for reactionary purposes look what the Turkish mafia did to the university professors or the religious fanatics who are rewriting or trying to rewrite and say I would talk about the history in my country you have everybody everybody beating against women who are whether they are video game players or they are sports writers or feminist activists everywhere this man's planning everyone is talking about made about rape murder doxing all the time that's not exactly an increase in democracy this is just unleashing of a tool that enables many to one ways of communication as a way of coercing thought and opinion this is democratizing totalitarianism what we call social media these days has a single emotion it's designed to elicit and that emotion is envy post the segment of your life the best part make other people envy your vacations your beautiful children your accomplishments leave out all the struggle all the doubt all the negative all the pain and hurt let other people envy you and the social media that build envy in order to increase desire in order to make an advertisement suitable for you to receive I want that life here click swipe done that envy breeds resentment which breeds anger which breeds that resentment of the street which is now in everybody's eyeballs and eardrums all the time so as we build this net we do not want as we summon people to the platforms offering the poor a discount come and be measured will help you to have access to what we get from you as we do that everyone gets interested suddenly in privacy because they must so let us think a moment about what we mean by the privacy we want to have in this net we do not want privacy is three things it's secrecy that is our ability to speak and think only in partnership with those we actually trust it's anonymity that is our ability to use the public space to think and act and experiment and try out without the association of identity with what we try and its autonomy that is the ability to make our decisions and effectuate our lives without the interference with our secrecy and our anonymity and this our autonomy this route of our democracy is what is attacked by the net that constantly measures tracks and experiments with us all this and we want to add another three and a half billion people to the surveillance organism and then and then the states show up when we move to this net we do not want this monitored net this surveillance system we empower social control in the state like never ever ever before I stood here four years ago and spoke about the possibility of the end of freedom of the mind in 2012 and somewhere in Fort Meade Maryland there is a secure there is an intelligence analyst asking at which date and time a young man in Hawaii named Edward Snowden watched my speech because of course by the summer of 2013 what I had said here in 2012 had gained some news thanks to mr. Snowden what he told us was what we all feared and he substantiated that the states had moved inside this data mining tracking surveilling net we do not want of course they did how could they not from the middle of the 20th century the most powerful societies on earth assumed that signals intelligence was the true secret of social power in the world they spied on everyone and others militaries and every government and eventually they began spying on all international commerce that they could reach because what they knew the Soviet Union the United States the People's Republic of China and all their satellites what they knew was access to information is power but when they have a net that measures everybody and great big piles of everybody's behavior taken from the machine which is experimenting always with everyone what they gain is power to run totalitarianism on the cheap 20th century totalitarianism didn't scale very well it needed lots and lots of people and it needed lots and lots of fear which could only be produced by episodes of serious violence people had to disappear they had to be broken people had to be afraid 21st century totalitarianism solves those problems you don't need so many people anymore because the platforms do the work for you you don't need to create so much fear because envy works so much better because everybody informs on everybody so they can watch everybody else and the next thing you know power has leapt higher than power could ever leap before with that increasing power naturally comes an increase in ambition the state decides that what it needs as a guy working in the White House told me only a few weeks after the last time I was here in the summer of 2012 says the man in the White House you know we've decided that we need a robust social graph of the United States that meant the United States government wishes to keep a list of everybody every American knows the robust social graph of the society you govern has now become the first level of ambition of the states and you can get it if you deal with the platform companies particularly if you help them wire up the rest of all your society bring the poor to the poor people's net thus generating the robust social graph of everywhere and don't expect the largest states to be content to leave that information in the hands of the smallest ones no no it's a robust social graph of the human race now what does one do with such a graph what does one make of the power one acquires when one carries an entry to every subjects mind of course it will depend upon the nature of the political ideology of the state each forming the net to suit itself each using the information provided by the surveillance of everyone all the time everywhere for its own purposes of course as we were shown by mr. Steven Spielberg in minority report last decade a beautifully imaginative evocation of how this works commercial surveillance is the basis upon which this new experience of state power rests we accept the commercial surveillance because it is fundamentally only being carried out for profit which is such a thin motive so lacking in malevolence that we can accept that we should go along with it after all they're like us they're only trying to make a living of course mr. Zuckerberg spends 30 million dollars buying all the houses around his own because he needs more privacy of course he says he's not going to allow his precious child to use Facebook in childhood of course mr. Jobs didn't allow iPads in his family but we think that that motive of profit is a sufficient reason to allow what we would never have allowed the states if they had come to us and said in the first place we wish to build these things we would have said it is without on any question the evil that we fought in the 20th century that for which we died or suffered or sent millions of others to die to prevent that from happening but to piggyback that on top of an advertising business what a beautiful form of camouflage that is so now we have the states in the position to benefit at the business intelligence layer from the data warehouses assembled by the platform companies Facebook contains information about the human race a sixth wide or maybe a third Facebook contains experiments with everyone's behavior generates a social graph of who everyone knows and why they know them then from there the state begins to put some code in those terms of service that you sign without reading they say of course that Facebook or any similar company may run any code it wants to improve the experience it isn't the data comes out of those businesses it's that code goes in and when that code goes in you have no idea what it is or what it does that's the whole point you're not supposed to what mr. Snowden showed us was that the governments the most powerful governments my own first among equals what mr. Snowden showed us is that those governments will push their way into those platforms will they nil they buy beg steal hack tap it doesn't matter in they'll go and once they're there how will you get them out what will you do I don't need to explain of course to anyone in Germany that there are people all around the world under pressure for uns insulting the little salt on I don't need to explain that a disposition to insult the little salt on can get you in great trouble the Turkish state doesn't have to use its own police they can use yours the Turkish state doesn't have to predict that Professor Chomsky or I might say something bad about the little salt on they can just wait and then reach out preemptively or not as local law permits we are building perfect despotism and we think we're only improving the efficiency of advertising regimes all over democratic or authoritarian want a kind of a legislated history manufactured image of the past glorifying certain aspects which appeal to them while hiding others while all this is going on Europeans have actually not forgotten their absurd demand for right to be forgotten paving the way for others to rewrite history and here again naively I thought that the only forgetting that happens on internet is that it feels like perpetually going into a room and forgetting what you came in for but as again I was naive about all of this so surveilling and predicting human behavior is the net of the new economy or economy of the new net some states support their local data miners I'm talking about by do neighbor etc to try to regulate the net and other try to regulate intermediaries or other people to express their own values and everyone spies predicts and resist radicalization states get their pushing around now by the eggheads on Twitter and not people in uniform they can turn civil society against itself with help from telecommunications service providers who are devoted to scrutinizing and memorizing the behavior of customers governments are building these robust social graphs everywhere this is for the purpose of perfect social control it can mean better subsidy better payments better social welfare programs no corruption and also means more effective tyranny and increasingly in escapeable prison for the human race look at bluff tail Utah where big love and big brother have become uneasy neighbors or this perfect storm of the terrible administered by Alibaba and Tencent in China there is the universal reputation score it's tied to the national ID of each person in the country and is based on factors like political compliance hobbies shopping and whether you play video games it's also generated not just by your your activities but by the activities of the friends in your social graph so you can imagine there's negative points for mentioning Tiananmen Square or speculating on official corruption or participating in activities from which state wants to nudge you away like playing video games adhaar the digital identity this biometric base unique identification number in my country to provide public distribution services and building a centralized database of over a billion human beings what could go wrong there Apple versus FBI saga is far from over all the policymakers and the governments around the world are watching what's going to come out of it because everybody wants to find a way to magically break mathematics so that math works differently for good guys and the bad guys all this solves the problem which we had in earlier centuries despotism was hard difficult to scale now there is a solution for all of it now everything this just it just tells us so everything that the net can give the states can just take away from raw connectivity itself to freedom of the market when cashless arrives when we go cashless we make the free market obsolete in every sense everything we buy everything we sell everything that moves becomes subject to bitstream signed by trust which can be blocked at the point of transactions in real time do you want to buy a train ticket that's very nice but we might not let you buy one there's no cash under the mattress because there is no cash there's no money in a safe deposit box just in case because there is no money everything has become a transaction at the will of a third party who can withhold approval anytime when we go cashless the day after tomorrow as society's race to eliminate the money that makes freedom in my neighborhood in Amsterdam the best grocer and the best baker no longer take money you have to use your pin card in the United States it's a little harder because we have legal tender laws that say that money is good for buying things India is rushing for cashlessness faster than any society on earth and when cashlessness arrives what we called the free market has disappeared forever what happens to all of us when this is happening around us what we do is we internalize this totalitarianism we organize our internal self so that we can fit into the score hunger games actually becomes a reality we internalize the hypnotic sayings war is bees freedom is slavery ignorance is strength the governments have also caught up with the social media platforms they know how effective usage of this can change their own fate they invest very heavily in their web based propaganda infrastructure the bots are created by the minute spamming weapons including armies of trolls now drown out Genwin online discourse common section or Twitter news feed where you go if you want to lose your faith in humanity now are crowded by propagandists some people are more sophisticated than the others the Chinese political weathermen as this Harvard's research study shows comments which are critical of the leadership they're allowed what is not tolerated our posts that may spur collective action those are blocked complete blackout now is becoming a common practice during elections many African Union member governments have recently adopted look at Burundi look at Egypt in February of this year as many people in Uganda were headed to the polls of the presidential election come and cut off into net services no Facebook no Twitter but this is because there is a threat to public order and safety and when as telcos they crawl in January of this year at this allowed shut down access to internet services in Egypt before in Morocco they blocked web services in 2016 since it started five states in India have seen a complete mobile internet shutdown everywhere on earth the governments are exhaustively destroying all forms of privacy and today unfortunately most of them believe that people who are followers of religion of Islam have no rights to keep secrets anymore quite honestly that's disgusting whatever free speech they are trying to prohibit by a prohibiting secrecy there in the end prohibiting freedom for all of us and there is no government on earth that any longer considers itself bound by principle to respects secrecy of its own citizens all that is left is our ability to encrypt if we lose that we will no longer live in a free society anywhere on earth so what do we do how do we deal we are no longer in a place where we can construct the net we want we can only resist the net that we don't want we can no longer accept network neutrality we are compelled to resist network hostility in such a world we must concentrate ourselves now on the piece of the network closest to us in that last kilometer that last mile that last hop lies the barricade that we must erect if we mean to keep a zone of freedom around ourselves the telecommunications service providers of the world are the entry point and first locale for all the tracking surveillance and spying in that anonymous beige cube at the corner of your street is deep packet inspection running its way for the maximization of telecommunications service provider profit a little super computer on a street corner measuring everything you're doing in order to figure out how the TSP could make more profit slowing down that which isn't profitable to it and speeding up the special services that are but that cube on the corner that little piece of the entering wedge of surveillance that business of retailing by the telecommunication service provider is where our barricade must go so what do you want us to do you want us to cut our cells off from the internet and just not use any of these services and sit in a small corner never using the internet no we're going to have to build a net that begins in privacy for us imagine at the top of a pole in every village every hamlet every farmstead every rural community every city neighborhood a little box whose job is to route for everyone with privacy you could call it a freedom box but you don't have to it should mix everybody's packets up masquerading as we say about routers so that everybody's packets in the village are indistinguishable upstream and cryptid made private linked only to the places that they need to go if we route in common everywhere if we encrypt everything all the time if we carry for one another and keep them from seeing anything we make the telecommunications service providers mere wholesalers of transport services they just move our packets and that's all but if we do that how do we actually get any security we terrorism is a real thing so is ISIS you don't want us to be secure and only talk about privacy everywhere we fear we fear things of which we ought to be afraid but everywhere we fear we fail to fear the things we should fear most which are the things we cannot see when we have made our technology strong enough to defend us from the strongest then we can start to worry about how to defend ourselves against weaker criminals but if we leave the largest powers uncontrolled their effort to protect us against the smallest evils will do us little good well it's all great to say this but what is it really going to do Snowden told us much but what has really changed everything has become legal now the governments know how to go around this nothing really changes everything goes on and anyway even if we do all of this what are we going to get out of the net those candies are not going to crush themselves and who will keep up with the Kardashians we don't need all this thing about education and everything we just let us just use the net and go on doing our business the way we do it it's true of course that what mr. Snowden did in the first instance was to bring us knowledge and the most organized parties in response were the secret worlds in every country and it's true that what they did was they went to their legislatures and they said please immunize us for everything we did wrong in the past and let us move directly to what we really want mr. Snowden proved that the strongest governments on earth were scraping everything listening to everything analyzing it later after taking it now and what the governments did whether the military platforms bill in France or the Snoopers Charter in the United Kingdom what they did was to say okay let's go straight to the real-time monitoring of everybody which is what we really want and every act of public violence only reinforces them in their certainty this is true on the other hand while we were on our way over here thanks to the German foreign ministries willingness to give her a visa if they gave her real time if she gave them real-time access to her bank accounts while we were on our way here the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to strengthen the privacy of email in the United States politics is working two ways now but we can't wait for politics and law we need technology first it's time for us to create facts on the ground Marshawn is on fall it's the young people of the planet who must save us now they have to write free code they have to use cheap free hardware they have to make the routing of privacy work we can do it we've spent 30 years making the code we need we've spent decades pushing for free or hardware we have unlicensed spectrum we can all use the Internet of Things should be the Internet of People first and we can do that the choices that we make in the technology we use will affect the politics is everybody gonna keep up with the Kardashians well I don't know I don't I've not got a Google ID or a Facebook account I've never used Twitter I live a life in the net it works pretty well you can do it too we have to get off the platforms yes yeah but I still want to share my pictures with everyone and also want to talk with everyone it's funny you don't share them with me I think you mean you want to share your pictures with your friends and what that means is we need sharing that works without a super friend in the middle we can do that surely we can do that in fact we've done it many times we just haven't promoted it the way they promote it and we want to make the net free and accessible to everybody too but we want to do it in a different way I wouldn't push you about this I wouldn't be confronting your desire for convenience and your need for security if there were time but there isn't time by 2025 it will be over technology is path dependent we can't reverse it later we made a great mistake when we made the TCP IP stack in the middle 1970s we didn't engineer anonymity in then and to engineer anonymity in afterwards meant making tour which is terrific but it's cumbersome and awkward and it's vulnerable and it can fail we need to architect the net we want and lay it on top of the net we do not want so that there is a choice if we don't give people a choice we will run out of choices one of the most important engineers in the making of the internet in that 1970s period of immense scientific optimism a man who now works at the fringes of the secret world in the United States he says and I agree with him this is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice most of the human race doesn't know what the choice is and if we here who do know don't help them to understand if we don't give them proof of concept plus running code the revolution becomes impossible time is running out I'm glad you're here thank you very much well before you all leave if this is the last generation that gets to make that choice then this is the decade for that choice to be made the components of our technological freedom with whether it's free software free hardware or free bandwidth they are differently concentrated and constituted people pushing for them have to get together one single concerted effort the free software movement the movement for free hardware the maker power the people outside inside bathrooms everywhere the ones who are individuals who actually empower technology or improve the ones who campaign for the unlicensed spectrum to stay fully free these are all different corners of the world but we all have to come together in a single movement quickly for the net we want for a system of technological relations that does not study us that does not surveil us data mine us thus prohibiting our secrecy and our anonymity thus eliminating our autonomy we are all separate strands of this technical and social thoughts we all come from different geographies have different colors of skin and other things different fields different worlds software makers access campaigners lawyers now telecom engineers hardware engineers all of you all of you if you are my age or younger you all know and understand this technology and you know what we are talking about you cannot afford to spend your youth any other way a world in which your children will live will otherwise be an unfree world it's very easy to mobilize citizens if it's war you put a propaganda machine you put up recruiting center and then you just go what we do need is a moral equivalent of a war but a moral movement not an immoral one it's not about violence but it is about technologies of freedom and we need to enlist everyone everybody so I hope you are all with us here thank you thank you so much Mishi thank you so much even for this perfect opening and this call to action we have time for one or two questions and there's a hand going up right there and there's a microphone coming to you thank you for a wonderful talk and I have a question for Mr. Mowgli and besides encryption what other solution is there to move packets freely across the infrastructure of the telecommunication providers I mean is encryption the only other only possibility do you think there's like a convention or something else that could impose the free movement of masqueraded packages across the infrastructure that is being owned and dominated according to the surveillance dynamics that you just sketched so what is there besides encryption we are completely dependent upon encryption the way we are completely dependent upon electricity we are not talking in this case about the the final product of our technology but a component which is indispensable to it everything is made of packets in our network those packets can be taken by anyone with infinite money and all the computing power they need and there are enough such parties that we cannot assume that any legal regulation or any form of technological design which leaves those packets open to be read is safe for human thought encryption is simply part of the way that we make it possible for to hear ourselves think without being overheard encryption is what creates the space within which we arrange to do our own thinking and save our own souls encryption is to the 21st century what literacy was to the 16th without the written word no reformation without no reformation no freedom of thought in the European world without encryption no human autonomy by century 22 and we have one more question up here in the front row thank you the two of you for this wonderful speech I have a question is there something else but encryption like legal possibilities for example that you must not depend on predictive technologies when you get health insurance that you have laws that these predictive technologies should not be used to get a certain government service or a public service or a service which is really necessary for your life well international covenant of civil and political rights does say something about right to privacy but each national jurisdiction is now using it to perhaps erode away which are the existing rights some of the jurisdictions actually are not even certain whether they want to give a right to privacy to their citizens or not but yes a lot of lawyers are understand sensitive to the fact that legal instruments are will have to work in tandem with technology to get those civil liberties back and to enforce such rights so various such efforts are going on the UN has appointed a repertoire to study right to privacy but yes they're much slower they move much them they move with so many components along and national security or other people always want to give us or present it in two binary forms you either get privacy or you get security that nuanced conversation is definitely happening where legal people or the legal forces sit but I do not say that it's gonna be that fast until people actually get together and make it a public movement it is happening small but it's at a much lower pace meantime in India you cannot get a propane cylinder to light or heat your house without an ad-harn number which is referenced to your retinal pattern and soon to your genome sure we can say that there may be legal restriction in one direction against the use of predictive technology for one government benefit but all other government benefits and most of the operation of economic life will soon be subject to precisely the predictive activity in the social graph to which you object the kinds of legal regulations you're talking about and that are more exceptions than they are the rule and always will be once we've made a change we cannot readily undo thank you so much to both of you can we have another really big round of applause even in Mishie so and now we are going to kick off the program and all the rest of our stages as you heard there are many we spent many many hours putting it together so we really hope you enjoy the program of course many of you will also be being in playing an active role in that I see many faces in whole one here who are going to be speaking throughout the three course of the day so thanks so much for handing in sessions to the call for papers thank you so much for coming here and being a part of the show just to highlight a couple of things that are happening today the track relearn so the track that focuses on education educational initiatives is going to be happening all day on stage 8 today we're about to kick off our music day on stage L in the laboratory you heard Andreas introduce in the opening a new location that we've expanded to this year Republica and and today's the focus on music but there's going to be a focus on a creative industry in arts track every day tomorrow focus on immersive arts and on Wednesday on fashion tech we have one of our annual returning highlights the sketch note session happening in after the break so if you want to learn how to draw along to conferences and develop your practical skills that way I recommend you visit that and of course we also have the media convention program starting in a couple of minutes I really look forward to seeing you back here at 1215 our next speaker is going to be our very own Marcus Becquedal thank you very much
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During the period from 2016 – 2025, the "other half" of the human race will be connected to the Net. Providing connection to the world's poor is the greatest act of social justice, educational opportunity and economic equalization within our power.
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10.5446/21074 (DOI)
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Hello, everybody. Can everybody hear me? Hands up for anybody who can't hear me. Okay, good. So welcome, everybody, to this talk. This is a very interesting talk, especially because I'm very interested in this topic. It concerns us all. So we're going to be talking about how citizens can participate and have a say in the upcoming BARAC consultation. And this talk will highlight the dangers and the hopes we have for the Internet of Tomorrow. And we have very special guests here today. Thomas Lonega. He's the Executive Director of the Working Group on Data Retention in Austria. And we have Kathleen Berger. She is the Program Lead at GDP. And Barbara Van Sheevek, who is a professor at law at Stanford Law School. So please give it up for them. Thank you. Thank you. Just before we get started, quick poll of the audience. Give me a hand sign if you've already been active in the Save the Internet campaign so far. Like any phone calls, emails, faxes. Okay. That's not too bad. By the end of the session, I want to see all your hands up for getting active in the future. So that's our goal for today. Before we start about BARAC, because I hear BARAC consultations and I'm like, okay, do people actually know what we're talking about? So let's break it down a little and start with what is net neutrality, actually? Net neutrality sometimes sounds very complicated, but it's actually a really simple concept. Basically the idea is that the companies that connect us to the Internet should not be interfering with what we do online. That has three components. They should not be able to block or discriminate against applications. And they shouldn't be charging fees to application content providers to put them in a fast lane. And the general idea is that that will save or protect the environment for innovation and speech that the Internet has originally created. If we were to politicize that a little, why is that so fundamental for the Internet? Just bring it to a point as if give me one sentence of why is that crucial? I think it is important because net neutrality allows us to have this diversity and this openness and freedom that we all like so much about the Internet, both in terms of our fundamental rights, which we enjoy in this medium of more than in the analog physical world, and at the same time, although it's economic freedom, it is freedom of competition, it is the freedom of ideas. Yeah, I would say basically the things that people like about the Internet, the revolutionary potential, that's all stuff that's tight in net neutrality. This idea that before, if you wanted to speak, you needed to be a journalist or be able to report it on by television or newspapers and that now you can basically just go online and reach people around the world at low cost and that's pretty cool and that's what net neutrality wants to preserve. Interestingly enough, because what we're going to talk about in the process is a very economic driven process and everything that you've said is very, very political, which I guess is linked to why you got active in this. What's your personal motivation if you were to briefly say what got you excited about this and why are you fighting for the future of the Internet? Well, actually I came through it through the economic implications of net neutrality. I wrote my PhD about Internet architecture and innovation and the general idea was that Larry Lessig, one of the big Internet gurus had always said, oh Internet, the architecture of the Internet was originally neutral so they couldn't distinguish between the applications and content that were traveling over the network and we think that was good for innovation but we don't really know and so until we know we should act on the assumption that that was really important and I thought that was a pretty weak basis to engage in regulation and so in my dissertation I set out to say, well, how does the Internet architecture really influence innovation? So it's 500 pages, so deep into engineering, network architecture, economics of innovation and then interestingly the result was, wow, this has actually been really central for innovation and so that's how I came to the problem and then once people started to say, well, the architecture of the Internet is changing and now Internet service providers actually have the power to identify the applications on the network, how should we regulate that? It turned out that wasn't so simple. It's really easy to say I'm fond of neutrality but it's really hard to come up with good rules and so then I thought it was just a really fascinating question to how to find a good balance between all the different interests of the ISPs and users and innovators and speakers online and so I mean to be fair I think my role as an academic today is to help people understand this really complicated topic. And I would say you just clarified for everyone in the room why exactly you're such an amazing expert to have on the panel so in case anyone doubted that there's no expertise on that channel, you know, I don't think we can get more than that but your focus also with innovation and you did your PhD in the US, right? So your motivation I guess is more from the European contacts so how did you get active in the safetyinternet.eu campaign? I mean before the safetyinternet.eu campaign there was this weird issue of net neutrality when I was always like a civil society person, when I was really young I started the LGBT work and then I did a lot of work in anti-racism and then when I had my first really boring job I started to listen to podcasts and so I came into the hacker scene and then I found out that there are digital rights and there is a really interesting debate about that with very interesting people and for some reason I did not get bored. Like normally I get bored after half a year but in this field I could just dig deeper and deeper and then net neutrality after data protection was kind of solved and we had a lot of wins around data retention in Austria. I thought okay, it's time for a new subject and net neutrality sounded really interesting and I just read a lot about it, talked with many people about it and particularly also read all the laws that at this time there were very few laws in the world around net neutrality and that was a really good basis when the European Commission then started their net neutrality proposal, the law, which is the reason why we are having this discussion here, I was in a poor position to do something about it and so we were actually the first to start writing amendments about that law and then in the discussion with the Brussels office of European digital rights we had this idea of why not do a campaign, how should it be called, let's call it safety internet and that's basically the history of the first iteration of this campaign. Okay, great prompt, before we go into the process of explaining what's happened so far, how many people are exactly currently engaged in safety internet when you say we, we did that, like how many people are behind such a campaign? That's a good question, I mean we had many new NGOs joining in recent months so I think we are actually around 20, 25, something like that all over Europe and a few global ones and actually in the core team I would say it's around 30 people all over Europe that work on this campaign and those issues in general. Before we go into the EU process, do you know how many were active in the net neutrality like public consultation process and how many people advocated for that in the US? Do you have a number? We had 4 million people who filed comments in the public consultation with the US, in the US. I think in general we have a much broader community of people who care about net neutrality and in the last iteration of the debate none of the big companies was involved and so that really made it a life or death question for startups and libraries and all those people who really depend on net neutrality and as a result we didn't necessarily have a lot of money or people, people were doing this in their free time or at night and it's, you know, volunteers working with me who would just go home after work and then do research on the weekends. So, I mean I do think in general that the public interest seen in internet policy is a lot broader in the US than over here and also it's not spread as much across the European member states but still the general problem that we are totally outgunned by ISPs with lots of money, many lobbyists and many lawyers is the same problem over here and over there. Right, and I guess that kind of like since we're looking for a new hope in Europe on net neutrality we want to have at least 4 million comments in the public consultation process I would say, that's my goal so you guys all got to get active. But let's talk about the process so far. Do you want to give a quick snapshot of how the EU process has worked so far and why we have that regulation before we go into a debate? Yeah, so basically the history about net neutrality in Europe is actually not really complicated because most of the time nothing happened. People started talking about net neutrality in 2007 after the American debate got really loud and everybody was expecting that the European Commission at some point would start proposing a law on net neutrality because it's just a very reasonable thing to do. It would profit the European economy as well as the fundamental rights so everybody was just waiting on what the European Commission would do but then nothing happened. And so actually two countries in Europe started adopting their own laws, first the Netherlands and then Slovenia and we had four reports of the European Parliament which are like a statement of will. In all of these four reports the European Parliament said we are for net neutrality, we want a law on this, we want to protect internet freedom and so we thought okay it's just a question of time. And the Commission thought so as well. C.Crews, the predecessor to the former Commission before Günther Ettinger, waited a really long time almost to the end of her mandate till September 2013 and then she proposed this huge law which was also incorporating a little bit about net neutrality but it was also talking a lot about roaming, about frequencies, about all those loosely related telecom issues. And September 2013 actually was really late because if you remember in May 2014 we had elections on the European Parliament which means half a year before election everybody stops working, everybody is basically going back to their home country and trying to win a seat for the next parliament. And so that was quite complicated to get this dossier through but there was roaming. Romaging was a really populist issue which is essential to understand how this dossier came about because roaming is like the carrot in front of the European Parliament. Every politician wants to go home with a huge victory and killing roaming charges, the things which makes using our phones outside of our home country so expensive is some really populist argument. So where European politicians can get a lot of plus points in their home countries. And so this dossier, this part of the dossier was the reason why we actually got this through before the election and in April 2014 we had a huge win in the European Parliament and the law that the Commission proposed had net neutrality written on top of it but it was actually the opposite. It was basically legalising all forms of network discrimination and the parliament turned this around. They gave it real net neutrality law which repaired all of these problems. But it's not only the parliament that makes laws, we also had the council which is basically the 28 member states, they then reversed the clock back to anti-net neutrality and so we had two versus one when all those three institutions entered into a really, really weird thing called trial law. So three institutions talk and negotiate about the final law and this is the most secretive negotiation process in all of Europe where you basically have no information, you don't know who is talking at which meeting about which topic but at the end you have a final law and it's really undemocratic and really intransparent and they came to an agreement at the summer of 2015 and in October 2015 the European Parliament adopted a law which is a mixed bag. We tried to get amendments through, we tried to clarify a lot of the ambiguous language but we did not succeed with amendments and now we have a law which you can read either as net neutrality or no net neutrality. It's a little bit like Schrodinger's cat. Just picking up on because I think if you're not part of the European process, identifying those actors and understanding their roles is not actually easy. So just recently I've been, because you said data protection we're all solved, I wouldn't necessarily agree. So I was at a talk with Jan-Philippe Albrecht who is the rapporteur on the dossier on data protection in the EU and he compared when asked about how to portray those three main actors which were the same in a really short sentence. He basically said, so the European Parliament is Middle Earth, these are little hobbits fighting for freedom and then the commission which used to be good but kind of fell over is Isengard and then the council just is mortar which basically tries to destroy everything else that the little hobbits are fighting for. Do you feel that if you, like the process that you've just described, I heard, like I was trying to follow this from the Lord of the Rings perspective and I kind of feel this fits. I'm not sure you agree but like maybe to make it a little more plastic. Kind of, I mean, the energy almost fits, I would change it a little bit and say the European Parliament was gondor. It was like this human kingdom which also used to be good but then they had a really corrupt king that sold the whole region out. And in the data protection regulation we had a really good rapporteur, Jan-Philippe Albrecht. He's a green politician and he actually cared about data protection which was the main reason why Trilog was so successful. They actually got a lot of the good stuff in the final law because they had a good negotiator there. And sadly in this dossier on net neutrality we had a really bad rapporteur, Pilar El-Castillo. She's a Spanish conservative. People say she was always in the pocket of the telecom industry and so she never really cared about fundamental rights, about neutrality, about the freedom of the internet. She just wanted to do something which is positive for the telecom industry. And she was negotiating on behalf of the European Parliament with the other two institutions. And although formally she would have been bound to the first reading agreement that the whole Parliament agreed in plenary, she still sold us out on many of those points and did not really negotiate for net neutrality but opened up many of the loopholes and ambiguities that we now have in this law. It's kind of a little gloomy so rather than middle earth we now have gone or. But like maybe if we look into what have we learned from that process so far, that also means that individuals matter. It's not just the process but it actually matters who's in charge of the dossier which might also be something that other regions come up with as an yeah. You can make a difference which is why we're also here because with that rapporteur thing that had such an effect on the trialogue, so I guess is that one of the takeaways that you would have from that campaign so far? Yes, the rapporteur matters enormously and you have to get a good rapporteur for a dossier to be a win. And what we always know, we are good in Parliament but we are bad in council and we are really bad in trialogue and what we need to learn is pan-European campaigning. We need to be able to fight for digital rights issues in all of those countries in Europe and not just Germany, not just France. We need to actually be able to have one common European debate which is hard in 28 countries and 24 languages. I think part of the problem is that many journalists only report on stuff that happens in Europe until after it has been adopted. And that's a real problem if you want to get people to pay attention and understand what's going on. So I do think the thing to learn from that is that we need to learn earlier so that people can actually do something. I mean so far the process, okay lessons learned, we need to come early. We're trying to come early with the second stage because right now as you already mentioned we are left with a regulation that leaves quite a few grey areas that leave room for interpretation and the question of how to interpret them and how to move forward and develop guidelines for implementation. We need to know what the problems are. So talking about the core problems with the regulation that we're going to consult on, we're going through them bit by bit so maybe we'll start with the specialized services. What does that mean and what's the problem? So specialized services isn't necessarily that thing. The general idea there is that the open internet may not be able to support all of the applications that we can envision. And so there might be some applications that really need very special treatment from the network. People have a hard time coming up with concrete examples but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. So let's just imagine this hypothetical unicorn that we are not getting because the open internet can't support it. And so to provide a vehicle for those kinds of services, the regulation allows so-called specialized services that are also provided over the internet infrastructure but run separately from the open internet. So far that's not a problem. The problem is that the definition of specialized service of when it's allowed to be offered is so loosely formulated that you could use it to circumvent the rules prohibition on fast lights. So the normal internet rules say internet service providers are not allowed to offer fast lanes to a fee to application and content providers. So Google or Facebook can't pay to be put in a fast lane. So that's good. But the problem is the ISPs now say that they think by labeling something as a specialized service they can now start offering fast lanes to totally normal internet applications that function over the normal internet so that you can basically buy yourself a competitive advantage. And so the problem is not the existence of fast lanes as such. It's where to draw the line between the legitimate specialized services that we want because they encourage innovation and the ones that would just be a circumvention of the general internet rules. I still kind of actually struggle with what a concrete example is. If I remember correctly then we've just been at the session of Commissioner Ertinger who was here earlier. He's always talking about their self-driving cars. Is that really the kind of thing that we're looking into as that's valid? Is that really like how do we deal with arguments like that? I think that's a side battle because nobody disagrees that there might be services even though we can't define them or put our finger on them that might benefit from that treatment. For me personally maybe the one that comes closest is remote surgery. Yeah absolutely. If someone is doing remote surgery then we want those packets to have very, very stringent requirements in terms of reliability and delay. Of course that's not really what we are talking about because a lot of what we worry about is sort of fast lanes on the last mile to the consumer and I probably wouldn't be doing remote surgery from my home. But I really don't think that's the problem. Let's concede that. That's a sensible idea. The problem is where to draw the line. As we all know, Deutsche Telecom CEO Tim Huttges said, we think this regulation allows us to offer fast lanes to normal internet applications like online gaming and video conferencing for a fee. And that's a real problem because it would fundamentally change how the internet has operated. So far everybody gets to use this on the same terms. I pay my ISP and the application providers pay their ISP and then the networks in the middle figure out how to move the money around so that everybody gets compensated. And that has kept the cost of starting new businesses incredibly low. If you don't do internet businesses then you might not really understand how low but it's sort of in the tens of dollars or thousands of dollars but not hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook it cost him $50. When Reddit was started they had $12,000. They were recent graduates. And in the US open internet proceeding that was one of the big questions that our regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission had to grapple with. Is it really such a problem if you can start paying for fast lanes? And so it was actually pretty tricky because the path to the good rule was viewed as just the nuclear option, something that had high political cost. And so they really, the politicians really needed to be convinced that this is important. And the regulatory agency originally said, we think it's not a problem. We think the internet can change. We think we can save innovation by making sure that the slow lane isn't too bad. You know, if you have a fast lane and a faster lane then startups can start with the normal lane and then graduate to the fast lane once they get successful. And that created a big outcry, you know, where more than 4 million people filed comments and all the startups said, no, it's not just Google, Facebook, Yahoo, which were founded under these conditions. This is not the good old days, but today things are different. We today build our companies by, with very little money, we don't get an venture capital unless we have about a million users. And so if you forced us to pay just in order to be competitive with established companies, then we just wouldn't have a chance. And I think that's the key thing that regulators and politicians are grappling with, that if you come from a world where you don't deal with internet startup, that doesn't make any sense because, you know, if you want to start a bakery, of course you have lots of costs and then you go to the bank and you get a loan and that's it. And so understanding that that's not how the internet economy has operated and what we would lose by changing that, that's huge. And there's actually a really important point to note here because in the US you had a debate about paid fast lanes and you just gave us the argument why these don't make sense, at least not from an innovators perspective. But in Europe we had a debate about specialized services, those magical unicorns that nobody has ever seen, that nobody can give you an example. They are for sure not remote surgeries because they almost never exist. They are, I think, also not self-driving cars because we have tunnels, we have rural areas, so there is just no coverage in any cell phone network. And we spent so much of the negotiation time too deciding about specialized services and when we look around at the other net and gelty laws around the world, actually no other legislator tried to define specialized services. I think in the US it was just a footnote that solved the whole problem and it took enormous energy in Europe to just discuss something and now we have this law and we'll talk about the regulatory implementation but one of the real funny things is that there is actually a regulatory problem that our telecom regulators are faced with because we have this great new definition which should allow for future innovation as specialized services and existing specialized services like weather stations are actually not covered in this definition. So they really spent a lot of effort to write a law which fails on almost all categories. I mean, to kind of bring this a little together, my background is working in government so why we ended up with this is also because the difference with the US is we have 28 member states trying to find a compromise and compromise language turns to, like, often ends up being very vague and leaves room for interpretation. So that's yet another challenge that we're actually dealing with that the regulation is also incredibly vague because compromise and translation issues made this whole regulatory process very, very difficult. And another issue that came up and that we need to focus on in the now public consultation process is the traffic management aspect. Do you want to just briefly explain what that entails? Yeah, basically traffic management is what an ISP does day by day to just get its normal network operational. So you do this, for example, because you have congestion because it's 8 p.m., everybody comes home, uses the internet and the capacity that you have available in your network is just not sufficient for the demand that the user produce. And so this is a case where an ISP can legitimately start managing the network, but there are various forms how an ISP can actually do it, does that. And one way of doing it, which is also the way which worked really well in the US, is to do it application agnostic so that the ISP is actually not differentiating between the applications but uses some other criteria, for example, consumption-based congestion management, where I just say, okay, the use that have used the most of their network capacity in the last hour, they are a little bit throttled. But actually it's just the pipe that's getting a little bit smaller and not prioritizing individuals' applications in that pipe. There are other forms to say, like, I have user-controlled quality of service flags, where it's actually, for example, my Skype that says this is now a real-time voice connection and the application says this is important but not the ISP. Because whenever an ISP is given the power to discriminate, to distinguish between applications, there is an inherent problem with that, because you have an almost infinite amount of applications that are often also encrypted in a way so you cannot really see what's inside if you don't use Deep packet inspection. And there are many problems that arise and traffic management is a quite complicated issue and the regulation actually gives us quite a solid legal basis to cover that. And we're just saying there's a free-fold hierarchy. So whenever you can solve a problem, you should do it as application agnostic as possible. And I think the general idea is pretty simple. The general idea is that even if there is congestion, we still want the internet to remain a level playing field, where users decide how they want to use the network and every application has an equal chance of getting to use it. And it's not this idea of an ISP picking and choosing who gets which treatment. And that would be totally relevant if there wasn't another way. But as we have now seen in the US and in Canada for almost 10 years, if we have had this kind of network management prescribed by the regulated since 2008, networks work really well with that. And so this has pretty important implications for how we experience the internet. Apart from experience, the internet that Deep packet inspection for a human rights perspective also has huge privacy concerns. Another issue that is currently in the gray zone is also zero rating, which I would say is quite a big issue for freedom of speech. How do you feel about that? And what does the regulation say? Yeah, so zero rating is the exemption of applications from users' data caps. Right now, most of us have data caps, at least on our mobile networks, often also on fixed internet service. And so usually if you use an application, it counts against the cap. And if an ISP zero rates an application in Germany, for example, Deutsche Telekom zero rates Spotify, then using Spotify doesn't count against the cap. And some people think, well, the data packets are still being treated in the same way. So if I use Spotify on Deutsche Telekom's network, the Spotify packet comes to me at the same speed as any other packet, whether it's Pandora or SoundCloud. And so they say, so see, that means it's not an neutrality problem. And what this view neglects is that users strongly prefer zero rated content. There are now a lot of studies that show that experiments slated one in the US where they had the same podcast where they offered the same podcast to some users on a zero rated basis and for others, they counted against the cap. And users who were offered the zero rated podcast were 61% more likely to click on it. So a huge impact on user behavior. What does that mean? Well zero rating is just another tool to favor some applications over others. And as a result, it creates exactly the same problems as technical forms of discrimination. And that means if we have a regulatory regime that has great rules for technical discrimination, but allows all forms of zero rating, then we have effectively made the law meaningless. And the interesting feature with the European situation right now is that it's not clear what the regulation says. You know, the public interest groups say, well, actually the rule bands all forms of zero rating. And then the ICPs say, no, the rules allow all forms of zero rating. And I would probably say, well, the rules prohibit the bad forms of these zero rating but allow the good ones. That shows you sort of the range. And now the regulators have to figure out what to do. And again, there isn't a lot at stake. You mentioned democracy. Part of what we are worried with paid fast lanes is that it's not just an economic problem for startups or small businesses who can't pay to be in the fast lane. Part of what was so exciting about the internet was that you didn't need a lot of money to speak to people on the same terms as others. No matter how rich you are, you can get to people. So now the law says in general, you cannot charge people to be in the fast lane. But then you can turn around and say, well, now just pay us to be zero rated. But a startup that doesn't can't pay to be in the fast lane, can't pay to be zero rated. And all these groups, net activists, independent artists, bloggers, new media, they can't pay to be zero rated either. And as a result, you get the same distortion of two classes, the kind of content this user prefer that zero rated, that's what the rich people get and all the rich speakers get. And then the other stuff that counts against your cap where everybody's really wary because you don't really want to get to your cap. And so that's part of the problem that we are worried about. Do you want to add to that? Or otherwise I would ask about the global context because we've just had this major win in India, for instance, and their zero rating is clearly banned. So is that something that you want to like little elaborate so that we have an idea of what we can tap into for our argumentation? Yeah, part of what's interesting in India is that they did a public's consultation just about zero rating. And there is this prejudice that people don't really care about zero rating because it's free and who doesn't like free stuff. And so a lot of politicians are actually worried to touch zero rating because they say, oh, people will be really mad about us, mad at us because we are taking free Spotify away from them. And what they don't really see is sort of how limiting it is. You know, if Deutsche Telecom gives you all this bandwidth for Spotify, why not give you the same bandwidth for a streaming service of your choice? Or they don't really see sort of the negative incentives that creates for the ISPs. You only want to pay for zero rating if bandwidth caps are really low. And we now have a lot of data that shows that in Europe when ISPs started to zero rate content, they afterwards either reduce bandwidth caps or increase the price of unrestricted bandwidth. And so basically that means as users we suffer because zero rating creates an incentive to lower bandwidth caps. And so we have less bandwidth available that allows us to choose the network in the way that we want. So but politicians as I say think, oh, no, my God, we can't touch it because people will be mad because we're taking away free stuff. And so India is interesting because they had in the second part of the consultation alone where they were just asking questions about zero rating, they had 2.4 million people commenting on zero rating. And that was particularly remarkable because people always say, well, maybe zero rating is a problem in developed countries, but in developing countries that's different. And Facebook was pushing this product called internet.org that where they enter into contracts with ISPs and then the ISP gives people access to a zero rated set of applications that is part of internet.org. And that's sort of low bandwidth. And so people said, of course, people in developed countries will be happy, some internet is better than no internet. And the Indians said, no, our startups will suffer. The American large companies, Google, Facebook, Netflix, they can pay to be zero rated, but our startups can't. And we want Indian startups. We want to hear from Indian voices. We don't just want to hear from the largest tablished media who can pay to be zero rated. And so it was really interesting because there was this huge mobilization in India and in the end the Indian regulator adopted really nuanced rules for zero rating where they basically prohibited the bad kinds of zero rating, zero rating against the fee and zero rating an individual application in a class of similar applications, but no fee or zero rating a whole class of applications, but they still allow other sort of beneficial forms of zero rating. And so in that way, it's basically a model for what we could do here. Absolutely. And actually, you already mentioned the Netherlands and Slovenia. I know that in the Netherlands, there's also just in February, been a judgment which also banned zero rating in the Netherlands. How is that like the regulation, like the law, the legislation in the Netherlands affected now from the regulation? Do you want to explain that very quickly? The Netherlands adopted the Nitton-Gelty law, which is actually quite good and also has a clear ban on zero rating. And then of course, the European regulation is above that because it is a European law and it's also a regulation. So it does not have to be transposed to national law and you would have thought that, okay, good, now the Dutch law is just dead. But the Dutch parliament is now in the last stages of adopting a law which will replace the previous one, but implement the regulation and just oblige the national legislation with the new European standard. And the law they will adopt is actually a complete ban on all forms of zero rating. So they are exactly following our argumentation in interpreting these new European rules. So we cannot be that off. And again, it is good because the Netherlands are really sensitive about this issue. And I've been traveling a lot to speak with telecom regulators all over Europe. And we have a very different set of debates. There are in every country a few experts that follow the international debates, but from a public opinion perspective, we are just at really different stages, I would say. In Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, and maybe also in Austria, the debate is quite advanced. But there are other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe and in Sweden, where the debate has just never happened. And so people just have to learn about what new neutrality actually is and how it will impact them. Before we go to the call to action of what everyone can do, just saying it already, like think about what questions you have. We're going to open the floor basically after this one call where both Barbara and Tom are going to tell you why we need to get active, when exactly and what we can do. So you want to start as in, you want to start? Okay, you start. So what's the process? What can we do, when exactly and who helps us? Good. So you can go now to safetyinternet.eu and there is really easy, simple tool that you can use to make your voice heard. You've seen in the US and in India how important it is, how huge effect it can have if people make their voices heard, if they actually participate in such consultations. And if you tell your own story, maybe how the internet influenced your education, your business life, your private life, all those things matter if you think about it in terms of freedom of speech of net neutrality. And our tool makes it really simple for people to participate in this consultation. Formerly, the official consultation of Barrack will only start at the early June this year and go till the 18th of July, which is actually a little bit of a flaw in the system because it is in summer, I know. That's not really the best time for political campaigns. Also Barrack only has a few weeks to analyze all those comments because the law sets a hard deadline at the end of August at which the guidelines that Barrack will create, it will govern how we have net neutrality in Europe, they have to come at the end of August. This deadline is just theoretical. I mean, they could break it if they really want to. Again, if we are successful in the consultation that there is a chance that Barrack just says, okay, we need more time and nobody would object to that. But going to safety internet, inform yourself, we spend a lot of time in the FAQs and you'll find a lot of background information about the issue itself, about the other debates in India and in the US. And then just make your voice heard and tell other people about it because especially the context in which you are, maybe your company or your student association or your digital rights NGO. There are many things you can connect to and where people can actually engage institutions to participate in this consultation. It was not just private individuals that managed to achieve such high numbers of comments in the US. It was also that people went to their company, went to their boss and convinced him to say something about net neutrality or go to your university and speak with the people those. And getting those other actors involved helps us a lot in making obvious and making clear how diverse this topic actually is. Yeah, the one thing I would say, I think sometimes if you're not an expert, there is this tendency to say, well, what do I have to offer? And I think it helps to think about the problem in two ways. There are two separate questions. One is the legal interpretation. And if I'm a normal user, then you don't need to engage in legal interpretation. But then there is also the policy issue. If with a law like this, it supports two different interpretations so lawyers won't be able to solve it. So in the end, it's a policy judgment call. And for that policy judgment, that's where people come in, where if you can explain, I'm a startup. And when I got started, we had that kind of investment, and here's why we wouldn't be able to pay for Fastlane. Or I'm a student, I have a website, whatever. Basically, those experiences that are relevant to the question of how would allowing Fastlane, how would allowing zero rating change your experience? That is a real contribution. That is helpful for the regulators. And so the tools that they put up at safetyinternet.eu, they actually help you structure your input at the right point. And then when the draft guidelines come out, I would expect that you guys go, people will publish sort of analyses relatively early. And then I think the one thing to keep in mind is some stuff might be really bad and some stuff might be not too bad. And that might make you think, oh, it's not too bad, so maybe I don't need to pay attention anymore. And there, of course, the things that are looking good are the ones that will trigger an enormous lobbying push by the internet service providers. And so no matter what the draft guidelines say, we will need widespread public support for the good solution. So apart from generating diverse audiences to bring that topic really to everyone, to explain it and to make sure that we also have the media coverage, et cetera, I think the easy step that everyone can do, a really, really cool tool that's on there is you basically go on and answer a few questions, and that generates an email for you, which you can automatically send to your regulator. So it basically interacts for you and makes that possible already in advance to the actual consultation because the time is so limited that being active over summer when you're actually supposed to be on holiday, and I know everyone's busy with everything else, but you want to save the internet, you can do that already. So that's actually really easy. So apart from doing all that, trying to amplify voices, this is something you can do right now. So I would really encourage everyone to do that. And apart from that, are there any questions? We do have a microphone in the audience, so please just give us a hand sign if there's anything that we haven't covered. If you need more examples, if you want to know how else you can get active, like translating, helping sort out the code, all these kind of things, it's all possible. It's a tech conference, so be creative. Ask questions. I'm here. Just put up your hand. Don't be shy. We don't bite because there's actually space between you and us. There's a hand right over there. I'm using my mic. My question is, what can we do to get this topic a bit out of the expert field and into the broader public? That's like the big question. And when we learn from the successors from other regions, which is really something that we should do, we need funny people. We need funny people to explain this complex technical legal issue in a way which connects with people. In the US, we had John Oliver in India, before the big spike in comments happened, because before journalists started writing about it, you had a group of comedians that made a really funny video. And so it is not us as the guys that read the law, that write the analysis, that make the website. It is actually, you need intermediary that sums it up. Because in my experience, the deeper you get into the legal debate, into the technicalities of the debate, you're losing this ability to actually make it sound easy, which is a bad trade-off. Any podcasts in the room who might want to volunteer for doing some comedic European white show or something? No? Yeah, but even just talking to your friends about it, I know I have a lot of students and I teach classes on that neutrality and they usually start with the students thinking, oh, the internet is the way it always was. And then suddenly they think, oh, this might all change, so I might want to do something about it. And they say, oh, it's so cool, at parties I can talk about net neutrality, which maybe tells you about how different the US debate is, where people actually think this is a sexy party topic. But as a result, it's really interesting that everybody and their grandmother knows about net neutrality. When I buy coffee on the train, the person who sells me the coffee knows about net neutrality. When I'm waiting at the White House to get in, and as a foreigner, you're not allowed to walk through the White House without someone who is accompanying you. And so then I usually talk with the security people, they know about net neutrality. And so you only get there because it's in the media, people blog about it, but also people share this on Facebook, they talk to their friends, they tell their parents about it, and those are pretty simple things that people can do. And I think it's easy over here because it seems so remote, you know, Barrack 28 regulatory agencies doing stuff behind closed doors, that it doesn't feel as if it affects you directly. But I think this can really fundamentally change how the internet works. Absolutely. There's another question. Does it work? Okay. Maybe I wasn't paying attention enough, or maybe I don't just understand European law. I'm from Denmark, we don't discuss net neutrality much in Denmark, actually. But I was wondering, you're talking about the Netherlands imposing a very strict law, which is stricter than the EU law. Is it possible for the local, for the national parliaments to actually impose a law that is stricter, more positive towards net neutrality than just sort of imposing the EU law? And I think it's a beauty of it because it's just interpreting, you know, you have to amend your national legislation if there comes newer European legislation that's above it, particularly if it is a regulation, because your national law has always to be in line with what the European law says. But you can be more specific. You can just not contradict what the European law says. And what the Dutch government is doing is basically following their reading of the European law and just making it more concrete. And they are using the mandate which they have in amending their previous legislation. But yeah, it is a little bit of a weird thing to do. And also, Berek is talking about implementation guidelines. So they're discussing of how can it be implemented, which already tells you there's different ways to do this and different readings into this. So of course, there is certain leverage, which also means if certain governments are already active in this and certain laws are already put into national context. That actually helps our argument if these are strong, because then you can say, like, hey, it's already in practice and it's working really well. So that just feeds into making sure that these are very clear, because ultimately you don't want different interpretations because the goal was to harmonize the digital market. So that, of course, should be the main goal. But yes, there is ways to interpret the law. It's also maybe one additional aspect in general of the idea was, and that's different from the net neutrality rules Europe had before. Before it was the member states could go further than what was happening at the European level. And this law was designed to prevent that and basically exclusively regulate net neutrality at the European level. But with respect to zero rating, there is a lot of debate. Some people, so basically people say in the negotiation, they agree to not cover zero rating as part of the regulation that apparently, so it is not how people view it anymore, but the law can be interpreted that with respect to zero rating, it basically allows, it potentially allows national member states to go further and then prescribe some minimum moments when regulators need to intervene. But that is relatively special to zero rating. And we really had confusion about this from the beginning. I mean, in the press conference when the law was adopted, the rapporteur said on a question from a journalist, no, zero rating is not covered in this regulation. Commissioner Ertinger said, beside her at that moment and did not object. And then afterwards, the European Commission said, yeah, it's kind of covered, but also okay and not prohibited. And now, a few hours ago, Commissioner Ertinger was answered this question if zero rating is allowed or not. And he also said, no, we'll have to see, we have to make a practical test before we know the law that we worked two years on, what it actually says on that issue. So I also think that there is intentional confusion in some parts. And this ambiguity at the end is helping nobody. Not even the telecom industry is happy with legal uncertainty. And especially so, we as consumers, as human rights activists, and also not the people that would invest in European startups. Because I cannot invest if I'm not sure that this business model will even work in the European network in a few years' time. Are there more questions from the audience? Oh, yeah, there's one more. Hi, I'm from India. And you're right. I mean, most of us started talking about net neutrality only after seeing the funny video. But then, and it had a link to it. So all you have to do is click the link. There was a template, you just put your name, email ID, and you send it. It's not really a debate. It was just sort of, you know, after you see that, and yeah, it does sound wrong and you send it. So is it something like that you're trying here? And secondly, in India, Facebook became the face of zero rating. And it's quite easy to hate Facebook in India. I mean, it is an American corporation trying to kill our companies. So is there a similar sentiment here? I would say it is similar, but different. I mean, this issue of digital colonialism was maybe the prime motivator in India. In the US, I think it was mostly freedom of speech. And this also came out of an analysis that being American means being able to connect to different opinions. The framing in Europe is mostly as industry policy, as a digital single market issue. And so we have a very abstract debate in some parts here. And the points where we were strong in first reading, when we send 40,000 faxes to European parliament, it was also just a one-click campaign, which made it easy for people to make their voices heard. The current tool that we have on safety internet is a little bit more complex, but it tries to strike a balance between creating really unique and individual comments in the consultation, but at the same time making it easy for people to just write one or two sentences about what they think and so kind of doing both at the same time. And to answer your question, as in whether Facebook can be like the enemy, I think for like, at least from a German perspective, Facebook is more an enemy to privacy. So like that link is very, very much on that note rather than that neutrality also because free basics is not as such offered. The zero rating services that are often offered are on top of data caps that you already have. So it's not like the start to get to the internet, so that's why it's really hard to politicize that in that way. So we don't have that momentum, which is why we need other ways to make things more tangible, I would say, from my perspective. More questions there. Does anyone feel you're now prepped to go on the safety internet.eu page, click and send your emails. I want to see all your hands up as getting active. Awesome. There's still another question. There wasn't just a hand sign of getting active. Sorry, I'm sitting in the back. I can't see you. Yes. Okay, that's me. My name is Wolf. Thank you for your enthusiasm. I followed today Barbara's speech and before that we had Mr. Ertinger on stage. And I think it should have been the other way around. I think it should be her to give the major speak and have Mr. Ertinger listen to her and ask him to answer her statements. I think we are playing something wrong. We are already playing the potential role of being losers. And I think we have to find for means where we actually have the power to be successful. You gave some good examples to be witty, to be tricky, to be all kind of things. In all German ways we had a word which is out of space now saying, in the stark arm es will stehen alle Reder still. We need something in this now in our debate. And I would like what are our tools which we really have in power to compete in this struggle for equality. Thank you. If I just may one thing about being enter theistic, that picture which is like, you know, if you're strong enough you make things stop. We don't want to stop things. We want to keep things moving which is why we want the internet to be free. That would be my enter theistic statement to that but I'm sure the others have something else to say to that. You want to comment? I don't know. I mean, that's an old workers union song that you were quoting. Said we have no union of internet users. But yeah, in principle something like this is needed and I'm really happy to say that more and more consumer protection organizations are joining safety internet, particularly in Eastern European countries where there is no strong rights NGO scene. But they all recognize that net neutrality is a core issue for them and that they have to work on it. And so I think a lot of the sensitivity is there. You know, it's interesting. Of course, there is a lot of education behind the scenes. I'm talking with a lot of policymakers around the world and in the US. And we, these debates are ultimately successful through doing two things at the same time. You need the right arguments and you need public pressure behind them. And if one of both is missing, you lose. You can have the best arguments but if policymakers feel it's just minority, nobody cares, they will not act because it's painful. And so, I mean, one thing I think happens in Germany that a lot of politicians don't really know about this and even if they do, they think people don't care. And so even just calling your member of parliament and say, what do you do for zero rating? What do you do for net neutrality? Actually makes a difference because it shifts the debate in a way that shows people that people care. And of course, that doesn't necessarily help with what Ginti I think, so it doesn't think. But of course, he isn't the only person engaged in the decision. So from our side, we would say thanks. We'll definitely keep fighting. We hope you join us. If there's no more questions, then thanks for your attention.
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When the US regulator FCC asked the american people about the future of the Internet a total of 3,7 million people participated in its consultation. Over 1 million Indians voiced their opinion when the Indian regulator TRAI asked them them questions about net neutrality. These were probably the biggest direct democratic movements for internet freedom in the world. In the next months the European regulators will ask all EU citizens the same questions.
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10.5446/20646 (DOI)
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Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here in Berlin. One of the first things I had to think about with whether an audience like this would really enjoy a nice long half an hour worth of PowerPoint and decided perhaps not so. All I'm going to do is talk to you about what I'm thinking about when it comes to the role of data in innovation, particularly institutions. To do that, it makes sense to start with the very idea of innovation. Innovation is different from invention in at least two respects. One, it talks about a change and you can't measure change unless you have some concept of measuring. The second element is that it talks about usage. As they used to say, you know, if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound? And invention is meaningless unless there is adoption. Innovation takes place to try and make adoption. When I was young, I remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember the first ATMs coming through. And people were building these huge monolithic systems to help deliver banking services through holes in the wall. And the theorists turned around and said, we have these problems of people stealing identity concepts of like the pin came through. But even in the early 1980s, the answer became biometrics. And there were people in research ivory towers who actually believed that when you wanted to get, you know, 30 marks out of a wall or whatever it was in those days, that you would actually be interested in putting your eyeball against a laser scanner. No concept of understanding what the human being would actually want to do. Would you trust in early 1980s, laser scanner is a slit in the wall in order to draw money? I mean, you know, instinctively, if they talk to two people, they probably will have got the answer no way. But money was spent on these things. Similarly, people designed services to say, I know what people will do on a rainy Saturday afternoon. They will stand in a queue and want to pay their bills through an ATM. Yep, totally normal. Why don't you want to pay your bills while it's raining in the middle of a queue? That's when innovation doesn't happen. Innovation begins when there is adoption. And we're lucky, you know, I live in a generation, we live in a generation where the idea of adoption in terms of being able to say who uses it, how is it used, what works, what doesn't work, these things start having an effect because you have an ability to have feedback loops. Any engineer will want to be able to design products with active feedback loops because it's through the learning that takes place in the feedback loop that one is able to assess what's working, what's not working, what's getting used, what's not getting used. See, for the modern internet firm, particularly those with subscription services, adoption is not just important. It is critical. It is the meaning of whether you get your bills paid. Because if someone isn't using your product, pretty soon they're not going to be paying the bill. It's going to be a decay. So being able to understand where adoption takes place is critical. Before we move into that and looking further at the role of data and adoption, it's worth trying to think about what innovation actually means. I spoke about the fact that it is through use, it is through adoption, it is through change. But it's the change use adoption of an invention. And the drivers for invention themselves are things that you can sit down as a scientist, you would have to say, you'd be able to classify what drives an invention, how it becomes an innovation. The first and commonest reason for an invention to exist and for innovation to take place through the adoption usage of that invention is a perceived need. How do you perceive a need? Well, one way of perceiving the need is to be able to have some model to be able to trace what a need is and how that need is exposed, how it is surfaced, how it's collected together to understand the grouping and clustering of the stimuli that make that need. At a macro sense, you could turn around and say the jet engine was invented to fill a perceived need of wanting to be able to fly further. Some way of changing from propeller style use in terms of fuel through to the jet engine, the design of the jet engine was to turn around and say, well, I need to fly at a higher sort of, you know, altitude, but within that altitude, I'm going to get less air resistance. How am I going to be able to deal with these to get the trade-offs? But the perceived need was to be able to fly further and someone like me wouldn't be able to be here except for that invention. The more common way is not just perceived need, but observed effect. And the observed effect route to creating an invention and then to getting that invention adopted, to be able to innovate, that comes from being able to look at something, record the results, track the results, understand the results. My favorite example of an observed effect becoming an invention is that of Velcro. The idea of saying somebody observes a dog, running through bushes, picking up burrs, and then finding that if you could design one surface that looked like the dog fur and another surface that looked like the tendrils on a burr, you got something with high cohesion and loose coupling that would not damage either surface or create pain and yet at the same time be able to have the cohesion to be able to carry and drive through. And over decades it starts getting adopted, increased use takes place because the context within which you can do that adopting starts increasing once you start learning. But if you look at something like that, the very nature of invention and then of innovation is actually based on the ability to observe, the ability to record, the ability to assess and create synthetics of what you observed and then to be able to build and adapt services as a result. For human beings we just call that learning, right? We learn ourselves from the time we are babies by being constantly putting forward some mental model, testing it, seeing what works and doesn't work and then adjusting our behavior as a result. Well that is as true for any invention and it's particularly true for innovation because being able to listen to what the customer is saying about what works and what doesn't work is the difference between seeing adoption for a product or service and not seeing it. This is the way life has always been and many of the failures that we see in innovation, many of the inventions that never went off the ground are where it's not been possible to be able to do that. I remember many years ago when I was CIO at a major institution I was trying to work something out with Apple at the time and it looked like I was going to spend some time with Steve Jobs. He came into the room and then he walked out, didn't say a word and I asked one of the other people, you know, doesn't he actually like doing business? What's the deal? He said he doesn't like CIOs, they are proxies for the end customer. He's really interested in hearing what the end customer wants to do and that's really important now when I look at an institutional role, always making sure that the voice of the customer is heard, what works, what doesn't work, when it works, when it doesn't work. If you look at modern sort of internet error organizations, one of the things they do best is A-B testing and A-B is just almost a frame, a choice. You actually can make that A-B-C testing for that matter but being precise in saying I'm going to give a set of options, I'm going to drive them through, I'm going to watch what people do and having watched, having observed, I'm going to allow that to track back to be able to figure out how best to serve the customer. That's easy to say and I remember when we do things like building recommendation engines, which many of you would have been used to, creating collaborative filters, people who did A also did B. Those kind of models are completely based on good feedback loops about customer usage but unfortunately we still haven't quite got to the world where perfection can exist. So you take my case, I'm a grandfather, I have three children between 18 and 30 and over the years they've all understood that dads are good for at least one thing. Usually it looks like this and the wallet is always a useful parental sort of connection point to have. So what happens is that my Amazon account gets used by all my children, which is fine except that when I get recommendations that are based on what they buy, it's completely useless to me. So I then represent some hypothetical person, which is the conglomerate of four people of different ages and all our buying patterns. So the very idea of identity, who it is at the other end of what you're watching, whether it's one person or not in some parts of India and some parts of the Far East, a PC may represent a village, a mobile phone may represent a family. So the idea of how you actually take that data, allow for the weaknesses in it, understand how you're going to be able to create some way of filtering the outliers. There is a way of doing it, right? And the best way of doing it is to actually empower the customer to be able to say, why don't you discard those things that aren't meaningful to your profile or behavior? So in somewhere like Amazon, I can actually do it obliquely by saying, I already have that book or I'm not interested in this. So there is a learning that takes place because I'm able to make some feedback on recommendations. But the premise is what is important, that any form of learning to be able to create invention, becoming innovation, becoming adoption, because it's that sustainable adoption that makes the difference in any form of business. And it's not just, you know, as Peter Drucker said, the purpose of business is to create a customer. Having that customer relationship is what drives it. And knowing that customer becomes an important element of it. Now, many of the institutions we have built over the years actually work on a multi-tier model where so much has been focused on production and distribution. The touch point with the customer disappears. So you have, you know, whether it's in the motor industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the soft drinks industries. I remember talking some years ago to the guy who looked after technology at Phillips. And why he was so excited about mobile devices, smart mobile devices, the coming together of the app and notification generation. And part and parcel of that was almost overnight, they could move from knowing 0.5% of their customers to knowing 99.5% of their customers. Right? Suddenly, there was a conversation. And like the guy said in the Clutrain Manifesto in 1999-2000, markets are conversations. And conversations are at least bilateral, if not multilateral. Right? The feedback, it's the word back in that that's important. The loop is a continuum. So we have the situation where at least as long as I've been involved with any form of invention and innovation, I've had to concentrate on adoption. That adoption takes place because the voice of the customer is heard. The voice of the customer is heard because I'm trying institutionally to pay attention to what the customer is saying. I then come on to the role of the Chief Data Officer. What has changed dramatically in the last 20-odd years has been the number of people that are connected. The number of devices that exist, the number of ways we're able to make that conversation takes place. When I look at an iPad, when I look at a tablet, one of the first things that comes to mind is we have removed a huge barrier to interaction that has existed for perhaps a century. The Quarty Keyboard or in Germany, I guess I'd call it the Azzerty Keyboard, but the premise is that we had created an artificial intermediator between the ability of a human being to engage with many information tools by adopting a keyboard. Now my one-year-old grandson has some basic understanding of what to do with an iPad because point-click, zoom, pinch are not things they need to go to school to figure out. In fact, why my grandson? My cat can do that. Yes, there are apps for cats. The premise over there is once again saying feedback loops are possible because we started removing some of the control points, some of the bottlenecks that came in the way of our ability to listen. In some ways, it's insane for us not to be able to get adoption of products because the customer's voice is heard in ways that were not possible beforehand. We talk about moving from mainframes to midrange to desktop to mobile to smart mobile to sort of now onto the wearables and embeddeds, but one of the key things that's changing and all that is not just affordability but the sheer number. Everyone and everything is connected if my cat's going to have an iPad. What happens when everyone and everything is connected is we get what lots of people refer to as information overload in order to make sense. Somehow you have to be able to extract signal from the noise because if everyone and everything is connected, you really have a challenge in terms of how to extract valuable information from it. But one of my favorite professors, a guy called Clay Scherke, he said there is no such thing as information overload. There is only filter failure. And one of the reasons why people have gone on to a lot of modern social media tools because something like email is what, 45 years old or thereabouts, over 40 years old. And the reason why people are coming on to these is that there is a switch from publisher power to subscriber power. I have the ability not to listen. I don't have to follow. I don't have to subscribe. So as soon as you go from thinking that control and filtering happens at publisher level to control and filtering happens at subscriber level, you're much more able to figure out what to listen to because the power is in you to choose what to listen to. So one of the first things that happens when you have an infinite array of connections is that you start being able to listen to the right things by that choice because you're not having to deal with the firehose. Tools like Twitter work because you don't have a firehose. You're able to segment the firehose into sort of capillary chunks. I can follow a person. And that becomes valuable. So again, part of what you start thinking about in the evolution of data and why an institution would even have a data officer is to be able to understand these things. To be able to know that while we can, you know, I think a few years ago people said the total amount of data that existed since time immemorial now takes a few years to be created. And then it became a few days to be created. But it is meaningless because none of us can actually consume that level of data. How does that data get consumed because it's filterable? How does it get filtered because it has been tagged, it has been classified, it has a series of metadata of attributes that allow me to select what I want. That's how consumption takes place. So institutionally, when you start dealing with a world where customers really are empowered to have a voice, when they don't just have a voice but they work with multiple screens, multiple devices, where location has now become just an additional critical means to be able to augment information, where time has become another critical augmented means. The way you need to think about it is in the modern world, all data is just bits in that sense, you know, and the bits are themselves agnostic of anything else. And the first generation of value comes when you're able to associate that data with time and place. Because suddenly whenever people want to talk about analytics or big data or whatever, the proposition changes dramatically, the filtering capacity, because you're able to associate an element of data with time and place at almost no cost. Okay, that's one of the things that the mobile device has done to us. We take it for granted but we are auto geolocating, auto time stamping, lots of things that we didn't before. After that, even if it's an IP address or a SIM card or some proxy token for what a person is, the next thing that's happening is that we are associating data with a person or people and quite often with the relationship graph of that person or people if you have the permission to be able to do so and if that has been exposed. Now suddenly you don't just have knowledge of where and when, you also have an understanding of whom. And those contextual pieces start refining the quality of the data available in order for you to be able to make sense in ways you couldn't before. And all this has been happening silently. Beyond that comes a revolution that's much harder. That's why you see so much being spoken about in open data, which is that we use labels and these labels are critical. You know, when I come to Berlin, I have to know that I'm actually flying to an airport that in 1937 probably was called TXL in terms of a three character ICAO name that nobody else would use except the airline industry. And in a strange way, it's fun because I was born in Calcutta and probably the only part of modern life that Calcutta still exists is in an airport code. Okay, peaking exists in an airport code, bombe exists in an airport code. You can't go there anymore, but CCU, P, E, K, M, A, A, B, O, M, they all exist because these labels are very hard to get rid of. They become part of the way people share information with each other, almost adjectival in their construct. So today, we have these millions of devices, billions of devices, right? There are arguments about whether the total of connected elements is going to be between 20 and 50 billion by 2020. They're all capable of being sensors and actuators. They collect information and they send information on. They're made available in file hoses that tell people what people like or don't like, what's being used, what's not being used, how it's being used, what time is being used, where it's being used, what switches people off, what switches people on. But being able to make sense of it needs to have some level of discipline. How do you understand the where, how do you understand the when, how do you understand the who, and how do you do all this in a way that you protect the customer's privacy? Okay, lots of people come and ask, you know, JP, what do you think? Who owns customer data? And the only answer I've had ever since I've been asked the question is, guys, there's a clue in the name. It's called customer data. Okay, the word customer is there for a reason. But when we come to today, and the topic that I promised to speak to you about was to do with institutional innovation and the role of the CDO, I wanted to build up to it to say, first understand what innovation is, to do that, understand what invention is, then look at why data has become valuable or an issue, come to a point where you understand the scale at which that data is available, and then finally, you will be able to see what the role of a chief data officer is. So that's my role. I get called a CDO. What do I do? Every CDO in a role like mine has four discrete jobs to do. One is to be a governor. Okay, you have to sit down and establish policy usage patterns rules. It's boring. It's block and tackle work. But it needs to be done. Good data is created because there is discipline. The way I like to think of it is, in the old days, every large institution had a trust level on data that looked like mother's home cooking. Okay, you trusted whatever came to you because you knew that your mother knew the recipes. She'd always buy stuff from the right places. You could trust the food and the cooking. Data was like mother's home cooking because all good data was surfaced from inside the institution. Roll forward the clock 40 years. Now we have connected devices outside the firewall. We have mobility. We have partners. We have alliances. We have the internet. We have the web. Most of the data that enters the firm is no longer created in the control of the firm. And if we behave as if it was built like mother's home cooking, then guess what? That's like having street food with a blindfold on and then wondering why you get ill. Okay, first role of the chief data officer, create the governance model that people start learning how to consume street food, which means recognizing it, tagging it, cleansing it, having the necessary protections on it. Second role, data is useless if you can't get to it. And we have created for ourselves an environment where getting to the data is not easy. So there is an engineering element to it. How do you make data accessible, consistently accessible, reusable, archived, brought forward on need, requested on demand with the same answer when you ask the same question? There is a third role, science. All this talk about big data is really important, but get the basics first. Good data is important. Small data is important. The big comes because you've done the hard work to be able to extract insights. Insights for what to serve your customers better. Insights for whom for your customers. And finally, finally, you can talk about building something that becomes a partnership to allow your businesses to prosper and your clients to prosper in partnership. And this happens because we understand we live in a completely new world with more data publishers than ever existed, with feedback loops that allow us to get much better adoption of our products. Learning to listen to the customer can never be a bad thing, but remember it's the customer. Thank you for your time.
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There is a new sheriff in town – and his title is Chief Data Officer, or CDO. Presented by Deutsche Bank.
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10.5446/20654 (DOI)
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Hello. It's my one slide. So, hello. I wanted to start by thanking Republica for having me and having me on the big stage again, which is a very exciting and intimidating place to be. And thanking you all for getting up so very early to come and listen to me talk about the things I love the best. So I'm not going to dazzle you with slides, partly because I tried to do that once before and I got distracted by my own slides. You can actually see that happening in the video of my last Republica talk. It's brilliant. I'm like, oh, there's another slide. Let me look. Oh, I'm giving a talk. Shit. Yeah, so that happened. I'm going to just avoid that. So we've made a little collage of all the best things from the Internet. And if it's, there's kind of a bingo. So if you can spot what all of them are, you get some kind of prize and the prize is knowing that you watch too much television. So I'm Laurie. I'm a writer and a journalist and a feminist activist of some kind. And I also write fiction and I'm a huge, huge nerd. And in the rest of this talk, we're going to go deep, deep down the nerd hole. And if anybody's not okay with that, because it is early in the morning, you can go. We're going to talk about fan fiction and D&D and all of those awesome things. So if that makes you uncomfortable, then you can, I understand. And I understand there's some prejudice, right? Because I mean, I'm a fanficker at heart. Hello, man with a camera. And you know, fanfic, there is, nerds like to think that we don't have a hierarchy, but we really, really do. And fanfickers are kind of somewhere down there below tabletop roleplayers and LARPers and somewhere above furries who actually get kind of a bad rap. I'm not a furry myself, but I can, you know, I think people should just be nice to them because really, we're not nice enough to furries. And that's the first lesson of the day. All right, so we're going to talk about stories and why stories matter. And this is something I think about a lot, both as a journalist, as somebody who writes fiction now, but also as somebody who reads a great deal of fiction and really reading fiction and watching TV is what I do with most of my life. And like I imagine quite a lot of you guys. And I think the stories that we tell matter a great deal. And I'm going to be talking here about pop culture, TV, comics, you know, science fiction. I think science fiction is the most important form of literature and culture by far right now and has been for many, many years, but particularly when so much of our collective imagination is engaged in trying to form a picture of what the future is going to look like and often getting it wrong. William Gibson said recently that he is considering stopping writing near future science fiction because it just doesn't make sense anymore. It's dated so quickly. So I'm going to start in 1977 and on or around the early months of the year 1977, literary history changed forever because that was when the story Desert Heat was published in a small self-published zine journal. The story Desert Heat was one of the most popular and well-known bits of Spock Kirk slash fan fiction. And look, there they are. It's like we found it's really hard to find good, actually appropriate to put on stage pictures of Spock and Kirk. You wouldn't believe this, but it really is. But just Google it and turn off your safe search. And yeah, your day will be better. At least, well, your day will be stranger, but it will also be better. So fan fiction was important to Star Trek and the whole world and the mythos of Star Trek from the very start. In fact, fans were instrumental in getting the second series commissioned because they were going to cancel it. And the whole history of 20th century science fiction would have been different if that had happened. But from the very start, fans started to write different stories within that world. And one of the things they started to write most enthusiastically was stories about Spock and Kirk getting it on. And thus, slash fiction was born. Desert Heat is a, I really encourage you guys to read it. It's completely brilliant. It's basically the story. Does anybody know what Ponfar is? We're deep down the note here. Yay! So yes. So Ponfar, I don't know if any of the rest of you guys, the normal people out there, you should know that Vulcans, which is what Spock is, they go into a sort of heat where they have to have sex or they die. And this is the plot line that launched all of fan fiction and all of slash fiction. So the story of Desert Heat is that Spock and Kirk are trapped on a desert planet. Spock goes into Ponfar and is like, oh no, I am in Ponfar. I must have sex or I will surely die. And Spock and Kirk go as basically, I volunteer as tribute. And thus slash is born. But part of what was interesting and important about that, apart from the rampant silliness, which I think is an important part of any mythos, is that in Star Trek itself, which was already a very radical show in many, many ways that just don't translate today, they had a black woman as a relatively major character, they had a Russian character, which was now, that doesn't look like the big deal that it was, but having a Russian character as a heart throb, I mean the point of Chekhov is basically just to be the guy who looks a bit like maybe a member of the Beatles who is snogging some girl in the back of the set. But Chekhov was really important. Anyway, stop talking about Star Trek. But what they couldn't show was the friendship between Spock and Kirk becoming something more because I mean if you watch that show, they're clearly in some kind of relationship. The Spock-Kirk relationship is the most important part of that show emotionally. And some of the fans were like, well they can't show it on TV, but we know what's going on really, so we're going to write it. We're going to write it because we love this show, but it's not quite there. It's not quite enough. And we're going to write our own version. That doesn't mean we don't love the original show, but we think there should be different versions of this story. And I think that is a really, really important moment with fans and readers and audience members taking control. And so fan fiction, yes, it predates the internet. This was already, this was happening in zines and in fan-kip journals being passed around and shipped across the ocean. One of them was called the Passionate Vulcan, which sounds like a kind of ladies home companion journal, which I love. If anybody wants to give me the best present ever, like find me an original copy of the Passionate Vulcan, and it will be my most treasured possession. But anyway, the fan fiction now, is fan fiction exploded because of the internet? And we're going to come to that later, what that meant for culture, how that has changed culture and how the ethos and spirit of fan fiction and collaborative, radical retellings of monomists and modern stories have changed the way we interpret culture. But I want to make it clear that stories are not just things we tell to entertain ourselves. Stories are a way of transmitting culture and in some ways homogenizing culture. And I always have been in, did anybody here study literature or English literature? Oh, not, yes, yes a few. You don't have to, I know it's a tech conference, but you can put up your hands, it's okay. We're entirely unemployable, and that's okay. But the earliest studies of English literature and the development of English literature as a discipline, one of the stories about it is that it was introduced as a way for women when they were first entering universities to study something light and silly, because we couldn't do classics or physics, because our brains would overheat and then our wombs would migrate up and strangle our brains, which is science, or was until quite recently science. But actually, that's not what happened, that's kind of awful in itself, but that wasn't the earliest teaching of English literature as a discipline, the earliest teaching of English literature as a subject, as a discipline, and this is from Anthony Burgess's history of the subject, was in the Raj, in the British Empire, because when the British colonized the whole world, which of course we're all very embarrassed about right now, they had to, we had to find ways of making sure that British culture was indoctrinated among the local population, and in most places that we took over, Eddie is I'd say, do you have a flag? We did this through religion, we did it through Christianity, we sent in missionaries, we made sure all the local kids were raised to believe in Jesus, and the ideals about God and proper behavior that Jesus seemed to be a fan of, which in that interpretation probably included never rebelling and being just kind of quiet and good the whole time, but in India this didn't work, because in India there were already huge religious problems and huge religious tensions, and introducing a new religion into that mess was not going to work, so instead they decided to teach all the kids in the schools that they set up English literature, they decided to teach them Shakespeare and Dickens and Jane Austen to transfer the ideals of British culture, and actually even today I was in a writing class recently with two students from India, and they said, well yeah, this is, you know, we grew up reading Dickens and reading Shakespeare and reading Jane Austen and learning that this was what literature was and this is how you do a story, and this is what the hero of a story looks like, they're almost always white and they're almost always middle class and they're English, and that's what you have to be to be the hero of a story, heroes of stories can't be Indian, they can't be, you know, living outside Europe, that's just silly, and this is how culture is still transmitted in the formation of those canons, the whole idea of a canon, you know, the literature that really matters, the West, Harold Bloom who is a very complicated theorist calls this the Western canon, the idea that there are totemic writers and these are the ones who really matter, these are the stories who really matter, we have a list, we update it every fifty years or so, but really it doesn't change, it's just lots of white guys and Jane Austen, and interestingly enough Ursula Le Guin is one of the, yeah, great Ursula Le Guin is one of the writers he includes in his last update of the Western canon as the kind of self-appointed guardian of this, so the idea of monomiths and one story and one set of stories being important is something that persists throughout English literature as a discipline, but you don't have to study English literature to understand that we, there are certain stories that we think are important and certain stories that we don't think are important, and this is kind of reflected in nerd culture as well, you know, if you're a nerd you like science fiction, until quite recently you've probably been used to hearing that the stories that you love aren't really important, you know, Dickens is important, Buffy isn't so important, Star Trek isn't so important, but Star Trek is really important, have I mentioned that I think that? Anyway, so around the middle of the 20th century has anybody come across the hero's journey? The hero's journey? Anyone? Oh, one or two, yes. The hero's journey was a pattern of story, it's called the monomith, the one myth, and it was invented by this guy, Joseph Campbell, and in this book, the hero's journey, and his idea was that really in every decent story it's one pattern, it's one pattern of how the story goes, one arc, you know, you have the hero, and the hero then meets the mentor, and then there's the call to adventure, and at first the hero resists the call to adventure, and then the hero goes on the journey, and then you meet the second mentor or the wise person, and then there's the princess or the love interest, and then there's the meeting with the father figure, and you can already tell that this is the plot of Star Wars, right? It's also the plot of the Matrix, the Lion King, and almost a lot of film and TV and popular stories that have come out since then, and there's a reason for that is because they copied it. Joseph Campbell actually was talking to the creators and writers of Star Wars, and it was specifically developed along those lines, it was one of the first films to do that, and the hero's journey is something that annoys a great many writers and thinkers, as well as probably a great many people who consume culture, because actually one story, if you see it again and again and again, and I know, you know, I'm not dissing on the Matrix, everyone loves the Matrix, and the Lion King, and Star Wars, but it gets boring if you're seeing that story again and again and again, because part of the reason it's boring is the hero always looks the same. He's a young, generally white dude, the fact that he's a man is very, very important because the women appear along various parts of the monomyth as secondary characters. Joseph Campbell was actually asked about this by a student of his, asked, can women ever have their own hero's journey, can we be the heroes? And according to one critic, what Joseph Campbell said was, women don't need a hero's journey. All through the monomyth, the woman is there, she just needs to realize that she is the place that everyone is trying to get to. And this sounds like such bullshit to me, I was so angry when I read that, but it explains so much of why women don't appear as heroes and genuine heroic characters with flaws and obstacles to overcome for so long because it's just not seen as the done thing. Anyway, so we're going to skip forward now to the 1990s, and specifically to 1998, which was when the establishment of the website fanfiction.net, which was when fanfiction really took off in a really new way. And an interesting thing was happening at this time, within mainstream literature, and actually also contemporary experimental science fiction, a lot of writers were, do you remember back in that time when everyone was really excited by the internet, and the internet was just going to be this amazing thing that was going to change everything, and everything was going to be brilliant, and live journals still existed, and around that time writers thought, well, we've got the internet now, we don't have to have stories in the same way, why don't we experiment, and why do you need a story with a beginning and a middle and an end? Why do you need characters? Why do you need development? You could have a story that's set on a train carriage with various little bits you can click on. People were so, writers got so excited by hyperlinks. It's really, really cute. It's so lovely reading some of this stuff. I actually studied some of this in uni. I wrote a completely nonsensical, it made sense to me at the time, that's because I'd been in a library for about three months solid, and I came out with going, I've invented three new words, and they were like, okay, yes, have a mark, it's fine, now we're going to go and have a walk in the sunshine. Anyway, all of this stuff, this hypertext literature, was trying to change the basic form of story, and what a story is meant to do, and it turned out that people still want traditional stories. People want stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, stories with heroes and protagonists. You can follow stories to impose a general pattern on the horrific randomness of life. Stories that can act as mirrors and as windows and can change you, and that you can then take on and change your own world, and stories that can comfort you and provide you with a way to rehearse trauma, and all of those things that stories are supposed to do, and they do do, people still wanted that, but what they wanted, and what people were starting to do over on fanfiction.net, they just wanted those stories to be a little bit different. They wanted different kinds of heroes, and they wanted different ways of telling it. And now I go deep in the nerd hole and reveal my own beginnings as a reader and a writer, which is in Harry Potter and Buffy fan fiction. Harry Potter came out in 1997, and it was so important to me. I was actually, I was 11 at the time, and I read the first Harry Potter book on the night of my 11th birthday, and I sat up all night waiting for my Hogwarts letter, and it, I know, I know it didn't come, but in a way it sort of did. But yeah, but then quite soon afterwards, when I was allowed to use the one home computer, I was, I found this world where people were writing all these different versions of the story, and it was really interesting to me. People didn't just want to read this one story about Harry Potter and what he gets up to. People wanted to make it a bit dangerous and a bit sexy. They wanted to see Harry and Draco get together. They wanted to see Harry and Snape get together, which would be odd. They wanted to see various other, I mean, a lot of it was about sex, yes, partly because a lot of it was being written by girls in their early teen years. Fanfiction has always been a hugely female thing. I think that's not a coincidence. Women often, women are the biggest readers, and they have, you know, a frustration that they don't necessarily see the stories they want to read and the experiences they want to see mirrored represented in the most popular myths of our time. But what was interesting about fanfiction was the community that developed around it. You know, nobody was saying that everybody's excited to see Harry and Draco get together, but nobody's saying that the main story is wrong because it doesn't have that. This is just an addition. This is another reading, and then there's the version where Harry and Draco kill each other and it all goes into a dark, gothic world, and there are self-insert characters who are probably boning in the ruins of Hogwarts. And, you know, all of that stuff, and all these stories exist at the same time. Some of them are incredibly well done. Some of them are incredibly badly done. Some of them are just porn, and that's okay. You know, it's okay when you're 14 and you don't want to, you know, you want to add boning to your favorite book, which has to be rated for kids. But the thing that's most interesting to me is that all these stories went on at the same time. Rather than one story, many stories all occurring within the same mythos. And Harry Potter fandom was one of the places where they really got very early into copyright though and into... J.K. Rowling has always been very okay with fan fiction being created as long as people don't make money off it, and you have to put a disclaimer at the top saying, I don't own these characters myself. I'm not making money of this. This is just a tribute. This is a fan work, and that's fine. This is not a talk about copyright, but I really want to see a talk about fan fiction and copyright, so I hope maybe for scheduling next year. And in these stories, the hero's journey looked a little bit different. And they were rewritings like, you know, they were race-bent characters, and there were gender-bent characters, and you had Harry as a girl, and you had Hermione being the most important character, and you were actually getting to make decisions for herself, rather than just following these two random dudes around when she's clearly the smartest one in the room. And there... So something interesting is happening in culture right now, which is that all of the kids, especially the young women, who grew up writing that fan fiction and reading it, a lot of them are now in their late 20s and early 30s, and they're starting to become powerful within the media themselves, and they're starting to create stories themselves. And they're starting to affect culture and demand more from our collective storytelling, and this is where we get stuff like this. And that up there is fan art rendering. This is all fan art, by the way, and I'm going to link to the artists on my Twitter, so it's really important to credit fan artists. But that is a picture of Hermione imagined as an African-American girl, and that was something that had already happened. A lot of fans, you know, reading the description of Hermione's hair, which is massive and out of control, you know, just assuming, you know, in their heart of hearts, their own canon, their head canon, which is a word I really love, Hermione was always black. And play has just come out. J.K. Rowling has released a sequel to the Harry Potter books in the form of a stage show called The Cursed Child, and the actor who's been cast to play Hermione is black. And that is a huge, I mean, you would not expect this to be as huge a deal as it is. Maybe I'm naive, maybe you would. But the internet went bananas, at which it often does. But the backlash was huge. How can you possibly have a black Hermione? The world will. It is beyond the pale of imagination. And it's funny, isn't it? How so many people who can imagine dragons, yeah, potions that turn you into somebody else, fatal curses, death eaters, they can imagine all that. But imagining Hermione as not white is somehow beyond the pale of imagination. And it's just, it's a failure of imagination. And this is the case in so much of the critique and the backlash, which is on against this new form of storytelling. And look, I've got all these stories. We had a lot of fun yesterday looking for all of these and picking the best ones. This is here, this is gender bent Esmeralda from Disney, and gender bent this is Ray, Mad Max, Fury Road. This is some pop art from Star Wars, a poem fin, and all of these ideas, all of the stories that are coming out now this year. We've got Mad Max, Star Wars, which is essentially, look, the Star Wars film, I loved it just like everybody else loved it, right? But it is the same story as the original Star Wars. What makes it radical is they've just changed up the gender and race of the main characters. They have a female hero and they've got a black love interest. And that is all you need to make a story so unbelievably radical these days that it will have half the internet up in arms saying, no, this is too far. Real science fiction is about men fighting wars on the moon. And that's all it can ever be and all it ever will be, which just shows that you haven't read half science fiction. So, I don't know. And this is, it's the same monomyth, but it's just because it's got a female lead, it looks so different and it looks so radical. And the backlash is definitely on. The backlash is on against all of this stuff because of this giant, because of this failure of imagination that people are having. And I've got some notes on my phone, so I apologize. So it's important first not to get carried away with how much culture is changing. These stories and these retellings are still exceptions to the rule. Women and people of color are still paid less, promoted less and respected less at almost every level of every creative industry. And for every Jessica Jones, there is a daredevil where women exist to get killed or rescued or provide some kind of pneumatic interest and plot points for the hero. And that's it. Daredevil is also the hero's journey, by the way. Daredevil's journey crops up time and again in comics, it's green arrow, it's everything. But for every orphan black, yay, there's a Mr. Robot and there's Narcos. And I actually watch a lot of television if that's not becoming clear. But the point is that what we have right now is not equality. It's not even approaching equality, but sometimes, and for a certain kind of fan, when you've been used to seeing yourself represented in every story and imagining yourself as the hero of every story, equality looks a bit like prejudice. When you're used to privilege, equality looks like prejudice. And that is the case in many, many social justice arguments that people are having right now, but particularly in storytelling because it's something that's so intimate and so important to so many people and the rage that white men have been expressing loudly, violently over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with the characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to any race or gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page. That rage is petty and it is aware of its own pettiness and it is like a screaming toddler denied a sweet. It becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that it is only a story. Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair to help us establish power and destroy it to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it would be so much easier just to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the stone age. Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world. The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry because it's a fundamental challenge to a worldview that has been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white, western men at the centre of every story is the same part that legitimises racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and every brown boy to identify and empathise with white male heroes is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else's shoes. What does it mean to be a white cell? Thank you. I got a little slap. That's nice. So what does it mean to be a white cis boy reading these books and watching these new shows, watching Mad Max? There was a huge anti-feminist backlash to Mad Max which I loved so much. Basically people were putting out warnings saying, don't watch this movie, it's too entertaining. You'll love it and you'll find yourself loving it and then they'll get you. Don't go. So what does it mean to be a white cis boy reading these books and watching these shows? Well, it means the same thing it's meant for everyone else to watch every other show that's ever been made. It means identifying with people who don't look like you, talk like you or fuck like you. It's a challenge and it is as radical and useful for white cis boys as the rest of us because stories are mirrors and they are also windows. They let you see yourself transfigured but they also let you live lives you haven't had the chance to imagine as many other lives as there are stories to be told without once leaving your chair. Look, the people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Ray is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, people who get angry that Steven Universe exists at all, I understand the anger. Everyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin colour has felt that anger and now imagine that anger multiplied a hundredfold and feeling it every time you read or watch or hear or play through a story and imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really. And imagine that suddenly starting to change because at the end of the day capitalism is just a story, religion is just a story, patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories, they are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures and I hope that right now the start of a huge rewriting is underway. We can only become what we can imagine and right now our imagination is being stretched in new ways and we are learning as a culture that heroes aren't always white cis guys, we are learning that life and love and villainy and victory might look a little different and depending on who is telling the story, that's a good thing and it's not easy and it's not over yet, nobody said it was going to be easy but changing the world is never easy, it takes courage and that is something I learned from Harry Potter and that's my talk. Thanks! Thank you! Does anybody have any questions or comments? Go on. Surely somebody. Go on. Just ask me about Star Trek. It doesn't have to be a smart question. This was Rundle Monroe yesterday, asked stupid questions. This is fandom. All right. Look. He's a question about Star Trek. Do you think Klingons when they are kinky then they have gentle sex? I'm sorry, please repeat that. Klingons. You know the Klingon. Copla Moktokshah. Did you just speak Klingon just then? A bit. And when they get kinky, when they have kinky sex, is it just gentle? Oh yeah. Oh that's lovely. That's such a lovely idea. I don't know, you'd have to ask. If I was a fanfic editor, I would commission that. I would. Actually the stuff that's been done with Klingons is very interesting lately. Even in the transition between original series and then the next generation. Do you remember that episode where they all go back in time, trouble with tribbles, and they meet the horrible racist stereotype people in blackface made to look like kind of scary Arabs, which is what the Klingons were meant to be. And then Worf, who's the Klingon hero of the next generation, somebody looks and is like what happened? And they're like, we do not speak a bit. And that's how they explain that word. I think it's wonderful. Yes, you know, that is very embarrassing. Let's not speak of it again. Anybody else? Yay. Oh yeah. Yeah, I read an article from you. It was about female robots. And about, like I watched X Machine, for example, one of the important future vision movies lately. And what do you think about femininity in future visions as females being robots or machines? What do I think about female robots? Yeah. I think it's an important... I have a lot of thoughts about female robots. I'm so glad you asked. So, okay, one of the interesting things is that people have always written stories right from Metropolis on for almost 100 years now. People have been writing and telling stories about feminized or female androids and AIs. And it is this really interesting mode in... Really interesting fictional mode because from long before we actually had the capacity to make AI, we've been imagining robots and imagining what it might mean to have robots do basic work for us for free. And the clue is in the name. Robot derives from the Czech word for slave. And right through from Metropolis up to Battlestar Galactica recent, the X Machina, the film Her, we had this... the writer Catherine Cross calls this a guilty memory of the future. And the idea that we are gonna... We have these creatures, we're gonna exploit them, and what's that gonna look like? And I think it is no accident that we imagine these exploited creatures who are designed to be exploited. We imagine them as women because I think it's not just about working out whether robots are human, it's about working out on a basic level whether women are human. And you can see that the story is always the same, right? It crops up in comics and everything. The story is, you know, the young, normally shy, nerdy, sexually frustrated man meets robot girl and goes through this emotional process of trying to decide, is she really human? Can I really love her? Can she love me back? Is it okay to have sex with her? Maybe it's okay? I don't know. And it's the story of this guy trying to figure out whether robots are human, but actually it's a story about guys trying to figure out whether women are human. And you can watch... I mean, if you're a woman who dates men, then you can, especially in your teens and early twenties, you can watch this happening in real life. You can! Yeah. You can watch... Has anybody ever told... I don't know if any woman who dates men here in this audience has ever been told, you know, after a couple of dates with any guy, oh my goodness, you're just different from all the other girls. Has anybody been told that? Yeah. It's the same thing. It's like, oh my God, I've realized you're a human being. I can really talk to you, you know, and it's like, oh, thank you. You've just insulted more than a half my friends. It is meant to be a compliment. You're not like all these other women. You're real. You're actually a human being. And recognizing women, you know, an oppressed sex class still as fully human is an identity challenge to men, and it still is on a deep level. And I think that's one of the things that's been worked out. And it's, you know, our expectations of technology shape our expectations of the future itself, and they're shaped by our expectations of gender, and it is both interesting and worrying that a lot of the AIs we're designing, and when I say we're designing, I mean mostly dudes are designing, are female or feminized. Ciri's default setting is female. Cortana, Alexa, the kind of terrible experiment that Microsoft had making the AI Tay on Twitter. You know, she was meant to be a happy teenage girl, and then, you know, making sex bots, making fem bots, you know, all these, you know, it seems that people are more comfortable designing a creature to serve their intimate needs and do emotional labor for free. They're more comfortable designing that creature as female, because if they designed it, I think it's because if they designed it male, they would have to treat it like a person, and I think that's the answer. So, yeah, that's my robot rant. Thanks. Hi. Back here. Hi. My question is, what's your thought on how studios portray some characters that are maybe in, that put them in other races or change the gender or something like that when it's made into a movie? Maybe the story was about an Asian character, and then they cast a generic white guy. Oh, yeah, it's bullshit, isn't it? Really? I mean, like, yesterday, what was the hashtag that was trending yesterday? And I don't know who started it, so I can't credit the person. Anybody hashtag trending on Twitter? George Takei was involved, I know, about Asian people not seeing themselves, oh, white washed out, that's what it was. Asian people not seeing themselves represented on screen, because even stories that are taken from anime and taken from Japanese and Asian stories and then done again by Hollywood, they're like, they're recasting them as white characters. And it's, yeah, I think there is clearly somebody in the studio who is saying, well, nobody's going to watch a movie with all Japanese characters or all Asian characters. That's just silly. Nobody watched, was it kind of, wow, nobody watches anime, nobody likes that stuff. Nobody watches that stuff, so we'll just cast Scarlett Johansson in everything. I don't have a problem with Scarlett Johansson, but I also think that somebody else should get to play robots someday. Because I think, has anybody seen Scarlett Johansson is now playing all of these robots and all the characters that we're now wondering if they're human and with the new ghost in the shell we're talking about, we're now wondering if they're human, it's always Scarlett Johansson. We seem to be as a species having an existential crisis over the sentience of Scarlett Johansson. And somebody has now actually made a Scarlett Johansson robot, a real one, that they can have sex with and marry. And I don't know what, I would really like to know what Scarlett Johansson herself thinks about that. But anyway, yeah, I think whitewashing is something that is still going on. I know the last airbender as well that happened and it is, again, it's a way of, in the name of making money, of pushing back on the change in culture and the change in stories that is happening. And yeah, I don't see any way that it can be positive. But I think what we're thinking, it's make, people seek, I think studio producers still see white and normally white and male as the universal, as the default, the default story that everybody can relate to. And any deviation from that in the view of Hollywood producers, I imagine, is a challenge and it means it's a threat and it means that people at the box office won't go and see it because everybody wants to relate to these characters and the idea that white people could relate to Asian characters is just, you know, beyond the pale, it's nonsense. But one thing that I think is interesting and good is that that idea of the lowest common denominator as culture becomes more diverse, as the internet becomes more and more powerful and important in shaping culture and in shaping how these stories are produced, and how you now have so much TV is now watched through Netflix, for example, and other streaming services, that idea of box office, lowest common denominator is actually becoming less important in terms of how our monomyths and our cultural myths are created. So you don't now have to make a product that will appeal to everyone across the board who might possibly be watching at one time because you can find your audience all over the world and you can find they can tune in at different times. You know, a show like, for all its problems, and it has many problems, there are some huge racist problems with it, but like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is one of those disappointing shows, which is quite feminist but also quite racist. But even that was considered too radical for primetime TV, but it was then commissioned and picked up by Netflix. Netflix has picked up a lot of shows like this and then it went bananas, and that was, and shows like Orange is the New Black, shows like Orphan Black, they have a life online which they could not have at the box office, and this is why I think movies are becoming just less and less and less important and less and less relevant. I think episodic narrative television is the preeminent form of narrative of this moment right now, and that's one of the reasons. That's it. You were talking about the hero's journey and I totally agree. Oh yeah, you are. Hello. Sorry. I totally agree that it's already an advantage to have female, black, Asian characters, but how would you imagine a change in the story itself? A changing storytelling from the hero's journey? Yes. Well, okay, look, so one of the things about the hero's journey itself is that if you tell exactly the same story, over and over again it gets boring, and that is one of the things that's unusual that's happening right now within culture, is people are realizing that more diversity in culture and storytelling is not just good because it's more diverse and people are seeing themselves represented in new ways. People aren't just going to see these things because of that. They're also better stories because they haven't been told yet. They're just better. They're just more fun. And things like Mad Max is, oh yeah, somebody likes my, hi, yeah, I love it too. Things like Mad Max and people going, don't see this story. It's too entertaining. They'll get you. It's like that. People might go or not go because of the diversity element, but actually these stories are popular because they are original, or they seem original, because there are new ways, you know, they've got new heroes, they've got new problems, they've got problems that people have actually been having for many, many years and centuries and generations. They just haven't been told in public narrative in the same way. But actually the heroes, I think if the hero's journey is going to have an afterlife, it's going to be in things like Star Wars, the new Star Wars, where they just recast it. And that's the only way to do the hero's journey in any original way right now. One of the things that's interesting, okay, if you look at the hero's journey, and it's very, very precisely like this happens in chapter four, and by chapter five he or she must have gone to the new world of adventure and taken the first step. One of the things, one of the stories that hits it almost like page for page is The Hunger Games. The first Hunger Games book is just the hero's journey, chapter by chapter by chapter. Nobody has really noticed this because it seems so powerfully original because it's about a girl. Because girls aren't meant to be heroes in that way. And that's one of the reasons it is so shocking and such an important piece of culture, even though it's just the hero's journey, again, because they imagine a woman, not just as your kind of basic strong female character, which is nonsense, but a woman and a hero with flaws and obstacles to overcome who gets to be the hero in that monomyth. So yeah, I love The Hunger Games, I didn't get to talk about it much today, but yeah, that's one of the reasons that is so interesting and powerful. Yeah. Hello. Hello. Oh. Oh, hello. Okay, finally. I'm very interested in your answer of the big Star Wars fan question at the moment. It's Ray of Mary Shoe character? Oh, what? Isn't she a Mary Shoe character? Mary Sue? Yeah. Well, you know what it means. Yeah, I know. It's a fan fiction character who is very, very perfect. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, so what if she is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what she is, it's important because women, a female main character has to be allowed to make failures and it has to be a perfect incarnations of fan fiction. Yeah. Well, look, so the whole idea, is anybody not familiar with the concept of a Mary Sue? Anybody? Yeah, okay. So a Mary Sue is a concept that developed within fan fiction. It's the self-insert character. You know, when you write the Harry Potter story where there's the exciting new character who's both a vampire and a witch and gets to have sex with Harry and Draco and all the, you know, and everybody loves her. That's a Mary Sue. And generally a Mary Sue has no flaws. And the criticism of Ray from many different parts of the internet was that Ray is a Mary Sue insert. And I think it was interesting in itself because, yeah, Ray is a character who's heroic and, yeah, badass and she has all these amazing skills. How did she pick those up? And, but it's the idea is that, firstly, it's a recognition that this is a fanfic coded retelling of Star Wars. But also it's the idea that, you know, a woman, a Mary Sue is meant to be a kind of interruption in the story. It's not a real character. It's a kind of upstart character. That's the criticism. And, you know, a woman who is perfect and has tons and tons of skills must be an upstart. She has no place in the story. Whereas, I mean, Daredevil is a Mary Sue. Batman is a Mary Sue. And so many male characters are Mary Sue. Or Mary Sue, what's it? Maxie Stews. Yeah. Somebody remind me what the Marty Stew. That's it. That's the version. But yeah, all of these characters are the same self insert sort of perfect character. And, you know, it's not criticized when that's a dude because the dude's meant to do all that. Yeah. But actually, I think Ray is quite a boring character because she doesn't have any flaws. Like Katniss is different because Katniss is frightened all the time. And she's kind of stubborn and nobody really likes her. That's what makes her an interesting character. Whereas Ray is a bit, I think they were just a bit nervous about doing what they'd done anyway. So they didn't bother to give her any flaws. She's kind of a fighting girl and that's it. But I mean, what we can, it's Star Wars. It's never going to be massively radical. I don't believe, I said that. Hi. I'm sorry. It's going to be a dumb question. What's your favorite ship? Oh my God. Oh, actually weirdly, my favorite ship was almost, was always Remus and Tonks. But then that became Canon and which was kind of disappointing because I thought it was just a thing that I was into and liked. And but that was way back in the day. I always, I actually, I found, thank goodness, most of my fan fiction, I read and was involved in communities. But most of the stuff I actually wrote was on paper in notebooks. I'm very glad about that right now. But the other day I went back to my mum's house and I found some of my old fan fiction. It was brilliant. It was Buffy fanfic. And it was an amazing, it was such a Mary Sue character. It was amazing. It was this kind of amazing vampire woman who was like English and short and got to have sex with everyone. And she also a witch. It was so good. And really embarrassing. But yeah. Yeah. Apart from that, I couldn't choose. I couldn't choose. Anybody else? So one more question. Yeah, one more question and we're done. Oh, well. Oh, yeah. Come on. Well, I forgot what my actual question was, but back to the Mary's Margie's stew thing. If you think about it, Luke Skywalker clearly is a self-insert character for George Lucas. So obviously, I think I actually read a post by the Hamel guy, Mark Hamel, who played Skywalker. And he basically just behaved like George Lucas would. And this got the part perfectly. And yeah, totally. That's adorable. That makes so much sense. Thank you. Oh, John, should we have a question? So one more, please raise your hands. Oh, yeah, over there. So I have a Harry Potter question. And I hear people talking about the sexual orientation of Dumbledore. And I want to know what you think about it because sometimes I think it's a homophobic thing. They need only a scandal and only looking for some gay scandal in Harry Potter. And they don't interest in everyone or interested in the sexual orientation of anybody. So only in the case. Do you think it's homophobic? Oh, no, I don't think it's necessarily homophobic. The interesting thing about Harry Potter, like a lot of YA is that there's really no sex in it at all. I mean, actually, Remus and Tonks presumably have sex because she's pregnant in the last book. But it's not ever mentioned. But yeah, nobody's, everybody, all the adult characters are apparently asexual because that's how YA is written. But Dumbledore, you know, the wife is never mentioned as, you know, a lot of wives are mentioned in the book. And, you know, J.K. Rowling just comes off and says in one interview that she'd always imagined Dumbledore as gay. And that, you know, I think the reaction to that was like, wow, oh my God, you know, this is such a scandal. But actually, it made sense to a lot of people who've been writing and reading fan fiction. And it made sense to a lot of people who, you know, who had been imagining slightly different versions of those characters for ages. J.K. Rowling is actually a really interesting writer in terms of how she engages with fans and what she allows people to imagine. Like with the casting of Hermione as Black. You know, when she was writing that book back in the 90s, was she imagining a young black British girl as Hermione? Probably not, to be honest. But she is open to that, she understands that fiction is more important than that. And that the life of a book is, you know, that books can function in a much more broad way than just one writer's version of it. And so she actually tweeted, you know, massive support for this, Rowling loves Black Hermione. And of course that made everybody even more upset. And I think it's, yeah, revealing that she'd imagined Dumbledore as gay. It was really exciting to a lot of readers because there are no openly gay characters in Harry Potter. And, well, I mean, I don't think so anyway. People have different ideas about the Kenneth Branagh character in the second book of movie. But that's just like, no, the third book of movie, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But yeah, there are no openly gay characters and this is a way of rectifying that because culture has moved on so far in the 20 years since that book was being written. It just has. And it's a way of keeping it in many ways relevant. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much, Laura Penny. Great. We have a short break from 15 minutes. One, but quite important news I would like to give you here. And it was yesterday, one of the first in Stauden, he didn't get his flight. He will be here today at half past twelve and keep his wheels. However, as you saw yesterday, not a whole, but half an hour. But always, Thomas Fischer, the director, he will be here and talk about the law of punishment and communication, as I said, at half past one on stage one. So now we have a short break and we'll see you in 15 minutes. Thank you.
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Stories matter. From video games to Hollywood to fanfiction, the stories we tell about race, gender and sexuality are starting to shift – and the backlash is on. How can we use narrative to change politics for the better?
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10.5446/20658 (DOI)
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So, good afternoon everyone. We'd like to thank you for taking the time out to come to this briefing. We're going to take you through a few risk factors for people getting involved in extremism. So, you can spot this when it's happening in your own community and maybe stage an intervention to prevent people getting involved in the wrong thing. Yeah, so extremism is defined as a worldview that encourages violence to influence political change. So, this can also include things like surveilling people to collect metadata and then using that to figure out who to kill. So, this is one of the people who decided who to kill based on metadata. She talks about how she uses F3A methodology to conduct analysis on raw infused humans, significant in comment, helping to create 125 targeting support packets and then nominating them to the joint priority effects list for kinetic targeting. So, she's using all of this intercepted communications, information possibly gained under duress from torture and various metadata to determine who to kill and capture. Yeah, and thanks to the information released by Edward Snowden, we have more insight into how far this extremism reaches. This is the joint prioritized effects list or a redacted version of it. We know from the Snowden documents that the UK has been involved in putting names on the joint prioritized effects list in Yemen and places which were not admitted to parliament before that reporting was done. And here, other reporting has revealed that NSA operations staged in Germany have also been involved in the interception of information that was used for putting people on the kill list as well. So, this is like this that people use to kill and capture. So, what are the, who can become a violent extremist like this? What are the factors that lead someone down to the path of using extremism in this way? There are these different engagement factors, things like feelings of grievance and injustice, feeling under threat, a need for identity, meaning and belonging, a desire for status, desire for excitement and adventure, a need to dominate and control others. Things like that are what lead people to become. So, these are worth watching, looking out for and I think maybe we can take you through a few of them one by one. We don't have time to go through all of them, but we'll do a few of them. So, let's look at example of people feeling under threat, first of all. Okay, this is a presentation that the City of London Police and the City of London Corporation have been using to brief nursery school teachers and primary school teachers in London. In case the images aren't clear, I'll just explain to you what they are. This is Occupy London, outside St Paul's, which was there from late 2011 through 2012. The image in the middle is the IRA bombing of Docklands, which happened in 1996. There was some loss of life there. And on the far side, that's the bus bombing in Tabistock Square on 7-7, the first suicide bombing in London, 13 people died there. Now, I think it's worth taking just a moment to appreciate the worldview that created this slide. I mean, because obviously on an immediate level, it's incredibly offensive, right? I like to take a moment to think, what's the state of mind which would actually see these things as equivalent? I mean, what must it be like to be living in a world where, yeah, sure, Occupy London and the 7-7 bombings are sort of similar in equivalent? What must it be like to be that afraid in a completely sort of non-discriminatory basis? There's a few more of these. Other things that the City of London Police thinks are threats. Left-wing extremism, right-wing extremism, as it says. Groups involved in animal rights and politics. Politics, generally. You go local issues, Occupy student protests, urban explorers, urban explorers, also seen as a threat. This is quite, you know, I know it's difficult to get yourself into the mindset of an extremist like this, but I think what it must be like to be as afraid of urban explorers as you are bus bombers. That's a real pervasive state of fear. It's one of the things to look out for. And if urban explorers and Occupy are considered dangerous extremists, then the intelligence community should be as well. They engage in much more violent extremism than those groups on average. So last year, some of you might remember that I released a database called IC Watch. At that point, it was 27,000. Now it's over 100,000 people in the intelligence community. It's resumes that we collected from LinkedIn and other public websites. So when we released this at Republica, we weren't really sure what to expect. And in the weeks afterwards and still occasionally, we started receiving various threats from people in the intelligence community who felt very much threatened by us just reposting their information that they had published online on the public internet themselves already. So these range from everything from people saying, we'd rather you take it down to all the way up to death threats, but most of them are something like this, something in the middle where they're saying, you are now personally enabling an assisting terror organization such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that pose a very real and immediate threat to me. This quote is from someone who is in the Army Reserves and lives in Indiana and has not been deployed, is not in any way in any sort of dangerous environment as far as I can tell, and posted this information about their work online themselves. And it was still up when they sent me this email on their LinkedIn profile. So it's very interesting that people feel threatened by their own information being posted online by someone else. And they feel threatened not by me posting it, but they feel threatened by some arbitrary terrorist organization that I have absolutely no relation to. So they are at a very, very high level of feeling under threat. So if feeling under threat looks like a possible engagement in fact of getting involved in the intelligence community, so does a need to dominate and control others. Lots of, you know, suggestive evidence about this in the Snowden documents. These were a few slides that came out of GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, which is the information operation-specific of GCHQ, the bits that tries to manipulate information to control and influence people. So you can have a look at some of their pop psychology here, question, can I gain this? Looking at dynamics within groups in ways that you should be able to try and manipulate them and pull them apart. And this NSA slide, which you might have seen before, a need to control and dominate. Know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all. A need to control and dominate. And there seems to be this obsession with information dominance. This is a picture of the Navy's Center for Information Dominance, which is a center for training people in information warfare. And there are a lot of centers for information dominance in the intelligence community. The IC also has a Center for Information Dominance, which is focused more on data collection. And there are about 1,000 people in the IC Watch data that are talking about how they are skilled in information dominance and various things like that. So very obsessed with using information to control other people. So another engagement factor, which is cited in that in the slide we started off with, is opportunistic involvement. And here's a kind of opportunistic involvement, what the NSA calls false party opportunities. Which is taking advantage of operations mounted by others and taking the information that they collect. They repurposing and rather charmingly call victim stealing, stroke sharing. Victim sharing sounds much, you know, so much nicer than victim stealing, doesn't it? Oh, okay, and then we'll move on to another engagement factor, which is involvement of friends and family. So sort of peer pressure. And some families are more high pressure than others, right? So this is what the NSA says about their third party relationships with, you know, with sort of extended members of the intelligence gathering family. NSA might be willing to share advanced techniques with a proven reliable partner in return for that partner's willingness to do something politically risky. A demanding relationship. And for a variety of reasons, our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations. Few senior officials outside of defense intelligence apparatus are witting to any sign of connection to the US NSA. There's a relationship in which they're expecting their partners to do politically risky things in the knowledge that their partners are working under a shield of secrecy and maybe not informing all members of their governments even, never mind the public. And so as an example of how this kind of relationship works, the Guardian reported on GCHQ documents which play explicit heed to these kind of pressures where, you know, GCHQs are achieving a lot of American money and must pull its way, some of these seem to pull its way. And that, you know, the pressure that they might not be doing enough to satisfy their NSA partners. And looking at Germany, according to NSA documentation, officials within the BND under, you know, the need to impress their American partners were working with the German government to relax the interpretation of privacy laws over the long term. And GCHQ in other documents took some credit for this as well. So influence of friends and family. Okay. And moving on to desire for status. If you look through the Snowton documents, there are lots of references to, this is one guy who says, you know, with the luxury of working in a community that's the most bright and smart, the most cutting edge people around and you want to see the cool new thing, then NSA is the place to find it. This is a GCHQ document where telling agents you're in a privileged position, you're in an enviable position, you have access to a lot of sensitive data, have fun with it and make the most of it. So desire for status. And sometimes the desire for status illustrates itself in bizarre ways. This is a trophy that's given out to people in NSA tailored access operations. The NSA is hacking group when they retire. It's this dragon trophy and it says on it, it's just NMAP and it has in Latin, but where the dragon written under it and it seems to be given to people in this particular part of Tau whenever they retire. And I just found it on someone in IC watches Facebook profile. It was a profile picture. Clearly very proud of it. I don't know how to be. So what does this focus on? One of the, so I mentioned earlier this database that I released earlier and it's 100,000 people talking about details of what they do for work and explaining it to potential employers just on the public internet. And this is really amazing because the intelligence community is so secretive that this is one of the few ways that we can do actual research on who's involved, what they're doing and look at some of the broader trends. So I've done a lot lately or been a lot before I'm looking at some of the lower scale looking at individual people. So I decided for the talk to try to do analysis of the broader trends, how things changed over time in the intelligence community. And I actually added the back end so it's very easy to anyone to do even some basic programming to add new trends and to try new trends and we can probably make it more accessible if people are interested. There are some limitations of this that I want to note in advance. The data that we collected is not a perfect representative data set. It's focused on most of our search terms are in English. It's focused mostly on the anti-American intelligence community. Obviously the search terms that we ran shape the results that we get because when we're collecting this data we're searching for code words mentioned in this note in documents or note intelligence contractors or other terms that we found in other resumes that seem interesting and we'll get the results that we get from those. But it's large enough that there are some interesting broader trends we can spot. The other thing is that sometimes there's some external factors that affect the data like LinkedIn was launched in 2003. So generally there is a peak in most terms that starts to go up after 2003 just because people are posting more about their post-Lincoln work than their pre-Lincoln work generally. And sometimes they add fields to profiles. Like actually when they add languages or skills it makes it harder to track those things. A little bit harder after that point because at least in a time correlated way because if you want to see when someone is speaking a certain language as part of their job in a particular year you can only look at the job descriptions. Not very interesting technical details but it affects some of the trends work. So one thing we did is we looked at some of the top languages that occur in this data. English is predictably fairly higher. People are mostly English speakers. Arabic is also predictably the second most spoken language in the data. For a while it was by a long shot but now it's going further down. Then there's some other obvious languages that match intelligence priorities. Russian, Pashto, Urdu, Chinese, Farsi and also just common languages that a lot of people in the American intelligence community speak like German and Spanish that's sort of in French. It's just common languages for people to learn. One interesting thing in this graph probably the most interesting part is the relative frequency of languages. We can see the popularity of Russian versus Arabic. Russian was far more popular than Arabic until 2001 at which point Arabic suddenly became much more popular and now it's going back down at the same level as Russian. So we can see interesting trends of when people start to be paranoid about particular groups or regions or countries and then suddenly they start recruiting more and more people that speak that language. We did the same thing with countries in IC Watch and see similar trends. The US is obviously fairly high up. It was not the top, it's that line in the middle. The line that's the highest first, the brown or purple one is Iraq and then after that the one that peaks is Afghanistan which actually follows the same pattern of when the US was at war in those countries. So that's quite interesting to see. There's a bit less focus on countries like China than I would expect. So that's also quite interesting. And then there's some obvious ones like Mexico and Canada, people in the American intelligence community are probably going to be talking about just because they happen to be neighboring countries. We also looked at the Snowden code words that were mentioned in these documents. So this is the overall number of people mentioning Snowden code words in the documents over time. So it goes up, I think it peaks in 2009 and then goes back down. But that could just be because there are new code words that we don't know about. So people are mentioning them less in their resumes. It's hard to tell exactly why. And we can see also which code words are mentioned in the documents. The ones that people tend to mention in their resumes are typically tools or databases. They're not like programs or initiatives because those tend to be more secretive and less relevant to future employers. But I know how to use this tool to intercept people's communications. I know how to use this database of telephone metadata. Most of these we have a pretty good idea of what they are. There's one one roof. It's one of the most popular ones that say some sort of database, but we don't actually know what it is. But it's one of the most commonly mentioned. So it'd be nice to figure out what that is at some point. And there's just a variety of things there. Yeah, there's information sharing systems, IC reach. There's cell phone, telephone metadata databases, internet metadata databases, Anchories, the NSA search system for text documents. So variety of things. So the other thing to note is that by observing this data in a public way, we are changing the data. Several months ago, we set in January and December, we recollected all of the resumes that people had initially that were in the original version of IC watch. And of those 27,000, 1,000 and 30 people had deleted their resumes and 664 had made their resumes private, possibly just because they wanted to do it, possibly because they saw that what we were doing and didn't want their data collected in the future. Some people also changed their resumes. So we added this change tracking functionality. And some people changed them to seem more benign, like this person changed, intercepted and translated target nation communications to simply process target nation communications. And sometimes they try to change their profiles in ways that make it harder to collect that data in the future. So the same person went through and intelligence analysis was the term that had caused them to show up in the original database. So they removed the word intelligence from every single entry in their resume, which didn't really work for hiding their resume in this case because we already have their profile URL, but it would make it, if someone did that before we collected it, it would make it harder to get that data in the future at some point. So, aside from these engagement factors and the broader trends, what sorts of challenges do Spooks face and what are some of the major pitfalls and issues that they're responding to? And we can identify some of these challenges really easily because if you look through the Snowden documents, they talk about it all the time. Obviously, there's lots of criticism of the intelligence community for looking at the whole haystack instead of targeting things properly. And this too much data complaint actually comes up in the NSA documents and the Snowden documents all the time. There's just masses and masses and masses of references. In fact, it's so well known as a problem that even like the Canadians even refer to their haystack and have slides with pictures of haystacks on it. I think the second challenge, which they talk about quite a lot and is the cause of many of the greatest intelligence failures that they talk about, is not enough data sharing. And this is becoming more and more of a problem because there's more and more private contracting. So there's more dispersion of the work being done in the intelligence community and each of those groups feels some ownership of their data and wants to control it and do what they want with it and control who can access it and ideally not let many, many people access it. So they don't share data with other agencies. They don't share data with other companies, which makes it harder for them to actually use the data for any of their objectives. So I think it's really these two challenges that are the biggest challenges of the intelligence community, they're collecting all this data, but they don't know how to go through it and they don't even want to share it so that other people can help them go through it and might be able to use it for something useful. So it's almost pointless collection most of the time. And these are actually a lot of the same challenges that I face collecting data on the intelligence community. So it's interesting to try to think of solutions to them. It's also obviously the case that the response to the Snowden revelations has caused some discomfort in the intelligence community. One of the more interesting restrictions on what GCHQ's reaction is are the legal challenges that have happened in the UK to surveillance, not necessarily because those legal challenges have won any great battles on their own, but because they've extracted a lot of information from the agency, sort of like working like a super-powered freedom of information request. And through devices like that, whole new GCHQ capabilities have been put on the record for the first time. Just a couple of weeks ago, Privacy International released a thousand pages of GCHQ in UK intelligence agency documents relating to bulk personal data sets, which are these massive databases, which include data pretty much everyone in the UK. So things like passport databases and travel databases, which the British government has only recently admitted that GCHQ has access to. So this is one of the documents just released by Privacy International, which they got via the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. And it's talking about the pressures from the UK intelligence community talking to itself that they're feeling about this dynamic. And they're talking about, at the very least, we'd expect increased and significant public interest and debate, which is something they don't like. This is kind of interesting because this is, again, is them giving a pet talk to themselves. So in this context, in the context of new information coming forward, they say, we need to be exemplary in the way we operate our existing processes for bulk personal data for these massive data sets. And this is really very interesting in the context of other documents in this cache. This is a newsletter sent out to MI6 analysts in September 2011, which is giving a list of dos and don'ts and reminding people of the rules for operating these databases, reminding people that you shouldn't be using this massive database of everyone in the UK to look up your addresses in order to send birthday cards. You shouldn't be using it to check your own passport details to arrange your personal travel. And you shouldn't be using it to check the data data of your family members. They sent another reminder out about this post Snowden in 2014. An example of an inappropriate self-search, something yourself, would be to use the database, the database of travel, which is taken whenever you show your passport on an airport or a airport, those records. An example of an inappropriate self-search would be to use the database to remind yourself where you've travelled so you can update your own records. Instead they suggest that people from MI6 should be either checking the stamps in their passport or keeping and running a record of where they've been to fill in their travel documents. It's kind of amazing. So bringing that kind of thing out is, from the Spook's point of view, clearly a challenge that they're facing post Snowden. Another interesting challenge is PaliJuice, some of the things that we're describing and maybe people not wanting to fall into this kind of activity, are the challenges that the agencies are having in hiring new people. Is it my one there? There are two sides to this challenge. The first side is people not wanting to work for the intelligence community. The second one is that the security restrictions have gone so far up after Snowden and Manning that it's hard for them to get the people that they need to work for them to work for them because they won't be cleared. So in the UK it's been reported that GCHG, which is one of the few bits of the British government which is actually hiring at the moment, is having increased funding because it's austerity for everyone else apart from the intelligence. Even though GCHG has left money problems in the rest of the UK government, they're having issues with meeting their recruitment targets. Entertainmentally they launched the Google Realtor campaign on the streets of Shoredy, East London, which is like the hips of the bit of East London, and in our trouble for Hackney Council because they didn't ask for permission for it. So I've heard a lot of people in the intelligence community talk about this concept of hiring the unhireable and how they want to hire these people that they can't hire for some reason that won't be able to get clearance and they want to figure out how to find them, how to convince them to work for them and how to get them clearance, which leads to people asking interesting questions. I actually have an audio clip where someone captures this problem very well. Is there a way to make the audio a bit louder? So here are some접 So ultimately the conclusion that they came to in that discussion was that they couldn't avoid hiring the next men in Snowden. They could either hire people that needed to do work or try to figure out ways to mitigate damage because they weren't going to be able to avoid it. Even though I think a lot of the response to some of the solutions hasn't been at the level that it needs to be, it gives us hope for viable counter strategies. I think that there are some things that we can focus on doing to actually have a viable response to surveillance. One of which is continuing to do things that the intelligence community knows they can't prevent which is releasing and getting documents like those documents that Privacy International got as well as whistleblowing and getting documents and releasing those. And the second way I think is to continue collecting data on the intelligence community and using their own strategies against them. But specifically in doing that, trying to find ways to avoid the pitfalls, the two major pitfalls that the intelligence community comes across themselves. That's having too much data and not knowing how to use it and not sharing data. So we need to find ways to continue getting more data out there but also to figure out how to use it effectively and how to collaborate with other groups more openly and more effectively in using that data. And another thing we can do to go back to the note on which we started this presentation is that where we can see the methodologies and where they're being exposed, where documents have been released, and they don't make sense because the engagement of factors that the UK counterterrorism strategy used to explain what makes people fall into terrorism as we try to demonstrate it. Because just as easily be shown as the factors which could lead people to fall into working for GCHQ or the NSA, where the methodology doesn't make sense, catarise it, make fun of it. Thank you guys. Thank you.
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To end limitless surveillance programs, we must understand how they begin. This talk uses open source intelligence and close readings of legislation and legal documents to understand the origins of the modern intelligence community and major cultural shifts that shaped it. We trace these trends from the rise of counterextremism ideology used to rationalize mass surveillance programs to the intelligence community's response (and lack thereof) to the Snowden revelations.
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10.5446/20662 (DOI)
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the end of Republica, almost. And thank you for being here. Thank you to Republica for having me here. As Max said, I want to talk about this age of empire that we're in and the movement that I hope, I certainly think I am a part of, Mozilla is a part of, hope you are a part of, really to create a balance and bring back the Internet that, as it really was meant to be, as a decentralized system owned by all of us. And so when, let's see if the clicker works. When Sandra and Geraldine asked me to talk, I was in the middle of rereading a book called Empire and Communications by a Canadian scholar, Harold Innis, who was actually an inspiration for Marshall McLuhan. And his idea really was the technology we use to communicate is central in the empires that emerge. And so, it just kind of got me into this theme and kicked me off on how to think about the empires we have today and how we make the Internet ours again. And so I'm going to talk about that in three parts. One is I'm going to talk about the digital empires that have emerged in the last 20 years. I'm going to also talk about the role that social movements play in providing a counterbalance to the consolidation of power and really look at the environmental movement as an example of that that I think we can learn from. And then I want to talk about our movement or certainly, again, the movement I feel part of it, we're out of free software, but really is about the digital world being something in our control and the control of everybody who lives within side of it, which increasingly is everyone. And in particular, I want to make one argument throughout this piece, and this is where I'm spending all of my time and significant amount of Mozilla's resources right now, is I want to argue that we want to make the health of the Internet a mainstream social issue that everybody understands is something we need to focus on. And in doing that, not only that we need to think about it from a government and a policy perspective, but as Lawrence Lessig once talked about, that we look at that from the perspective of laws and social norms and markets and code that reflect those values of decentralization of openness that the Internet was built on. So hopefully I will convince you all of that. This is a stupidly ambitious talk, so if I get lost or get confused, try to clap and wake me up and encourage me to kind of move on. Because it's sort of a journey to make an argument that is a little bit new for us and for me, but is central actually to where Mozilla wants to go and hopes that you will come alongside of us. So here we go. First, this idea of empire, and what I'm going to do at the beginning of each section, I'm Canadian, you're going to get a black and white picture of a famous Canadian or a not so famous Canadian, so this is Harold Innis in a canoe, I don't know when, probably the 30s, and he was a political economy professor at the University of Toronto. And as I said, he made this connection between how communications work and how empires formed and consolidated power. And the quote here is that the sword and the pen, in the case of the Roman Empire, worked together. That the power was increased by consolidating a few hands and the writing in particular was central to that. And so we take a little look at the map of the Roman Empire. You know, at one level it's probably something you saw in history class and looks fairly familiar, but what that actually was was many villages and towns and cities and kingdoms that over the course of decades and centuries were consolidated into a single thing with one central source of power. And the Greeks never expanded their power that far or any other empire, the Egyptians before the Romans, in part because they actually didn't have the advanced communication systems that were developed both with paper, of course the Egyptians had paper, but also with literacy, not just amongst scholars, but actually amongst the military. And so you're able to actually take all of these independent forces or kind of cultures, cities, villages, towns, kingdoms, as I say, and roll them into one. And obviously, you know, that might be good if you're Caesar, but it is not very good if you're somebody whose village or town or kingdom has been rolled into the empire. Although there are benefits, there's roads, there's just not freedom. Of course, the map of the internet, at least the one that I have in my head, looks very different than that map of Rome. This is a map of internet service providers, all the internet service providers on the internet in 1999. And it looks very much, you know, like a fractal sort of expression where every bit of it really is equal to every other bit of it. And that to me is that, you know, the thing about the internet that I love and I think is potentially empowering, has been dramatically empowering, but is not necessarily inherently there without caretaking, is this map of the internet as a decentralized system. And you know, in that system, this is actually quite embarrassingly my first web page. I thought that cows instead of cats would become the currency of the internet and I was wrong. But this was my first website and, you know, it kind of was like my little village and that was what in the mid-90s the internet was. It's all carving out our own space, homesteading, and everybody really who had an idea and could figure out how to code up a web page, really being able to kind of set up their own little village. And of course, I still, as probably everybody else here, have a presence on the internet, have many presence on the internet. But the one that's most common that I use a lot looks a lot like this. And despite my incredibly bad design skills, I think this is actually uglier. And so this is my Facebook page. Somehow Facebook thinks I'm interested in World Naked Gardening Day and that I'm going to vote for the Ontario Liberal Party. But it's a big shift in the map of the internet where we move from our own homesteading, our own villages, to really effectively being inside for most people's self-expression a set of walled gardens. And you know, you could easily argue, well, you know, so what? More people can express themselves, there's more creativity, and in some ways that's true. And maybe I'm just being romantic about my first web page. But I feel there's something lost in that. But maybe more important is how the maps change in terms of power from that first internet map to the moment we are now in terms of empire. And I think one place to look at it is to look at what's happened with smartphones and the app economy. How many people here have smartphones? Just a small poll. Right. How many people had smartphones 10 years ago? Right. So, you know, the whole, and I might have also, it's kind of just around then. And, you know, the whole way that we access the internet has shifted from the browser, from what I made that first web page probably and Netscape Composer to the smartphone, which again is a huge source of creativity. But the power dynamics on the internet have shifted dramatically in the age of the smartphone. And you know, one way to look at it is in the US, I'm Canadian but I'll use the US example, Android is about 58% of the market. It's significant. But it's not a monopoly in that case. Although I think I don't know what the European percentages are in different European countries, as most people here will probably know, even at those sorts of levels the EU is looking into is Google practicing anti-competitive behavior and how it bundles things inside of Android. But really if you actually look at other places where we're seeing more growth in smartphones, faster numbers of growth in emerging markets, you actually see very different picture because the iPhone is irrelevant in a place like India and effectively Google is the only player in the market. And so in India, Android is 91% market share, very close to the 98% market share the internet explorer had and the kind of windows in its heyday. And I actually often think of Android as the Windows 95 of the emerging economies or the developing world. It is the only thing. Now, you know, maybe that's not bad, although when we just had Windows there were a lot of governments who were upset and got Microsoft to unbundle things and help give us choice. I certainly think that was the right thing for those governments to do. But you know, the difference with Android in this situation is it really owns the whole stack. It owns everything from the operating system, I mean, mostly it doesn't own the hardware. So from the hardware up to the identity system, to email, to distribution of all content through the Play Store, you know, you can't get stuff easily on that device without actually going through Google. So you have a vertically integrated monopoly emerging, especially in places where they're really trying to build their digital economies for the first time. So that's a kind of an interesting challenge and to me hints at this kind of growing imperial power. Another way to look at it, we co-funded a report called Winners and Losers with a group Care Boot Digital and they looked at basically trade flows in the app economy. So how is money flowing and even just usage flowing in smartphone apps? So these are the cities in the world where you see the most revenue generated from the app economy. And I'm not showing it by scale. Really Silicon Valley and China are the two places where really the money is. I mean, as most of you know, there aren't other than Skype that many huge global apps from a European context. So most of the money is flowing back to Silicon Valley and China. But then where is most of the use emerging and growing? The major, the fastest growing smartphone markets are these ones. They're in none of the places the apps come from. So if you want to see the trade flow, you just go back and forth between these two slides. Come on. There we go. You know, it's kind of, you see something familiar there. And it looks to me a lot like this, which is a map of the British Empire. I could put any other European Empire of the 18th or 19th century there. But the pattern here is that resources are extracted from poorer countries. In this case, the resources being eyeballs and people's attention and people's use of the internet. They're taken back to rich countries, their process, their value added, and then they're shipped and sold back to those poorer countries. To me, that app economy trade flow really is a colonial trade flow. And we, when we look even further into that research that came out of Caraboo, it is virtually impossible. I mean, we just don't, maybe it's not impossible. We do not see cases of people in the fastest growing smartphone markets breaking out with apps and internet businesses barely even in their own economies, much less on a global scale. Incredibly hard to enter the market. So those are some of the factors that I start to think of as being this age of empire, which is really about consolidation of control. It's not that Google in particular around Android is evil or that Facebook is evil. It's that they really have gotten too much power on a medium that was designed to be decentralized, which in its humanizing and democratic potential is decentralized. So we have a problem of consolidation of power or something that actually we want to keep power distributed. One other interesting angle just to kind of finish up this empire piece is where do the citizens of the internet fit in? And how much do they know about what's going on and have agency? Because this is not an empire by pure force of will. We all use Facebook and Google and Apple tools because we like them. Some of us know how to opt out. Many people don't. Extreme version of that is ourselves as well as a couple of other folks, in this case, Quartz, started doing research with new smartphone users about 18 months ago. And one of the things that we found in our field research, we would go up to somebody and say, do you use the internet on that smartphone? And they say, well, what's the internet? And they say, oh, well, what do you use it for? Do you use it just for telephone calls and text messages? Oh, no, no, I use it for Facebook. And in case after case, in both a set of African countries and in India and Bangladesh, found that people are extensively using Facebook and do not see that there is an internet beyond that. Again, maybe you think there's no crime in that, but to me, the beauty of the internet is all of the infinite things you can find in it. And to think that you have an internet you can't see beyond one website, to me is not the internet I want to build in the future. And as Facebook rolls out free basics, which is basically a free access to Facebook and five or 10 or 20 other websites for poor people, we get to a place where the internet is very different for the poor than the rich in those countries. And that empire of imagination, to only see a very narrow field of view, is something that actually gets baked into society. So you may be sitting here thinking, you know, who cares, Mark, whatever, empires. I certainly think there is a shift in power on the internet that is dramatic that we need to pay attention to. What was interesting, how many people saw the cover of the Economist with Zuckerberg on it two weeks ago? Is anybody here? A very tiny number of people. So for those of you who didn't, this is what it was. And so the Economist also thinks that Zuckerberg has imperial ambitions as the headline goes, but we are in this age of empire. And in the Economist case, really, they talk about the empires battling it out, Google, and Apple, and Amazon, and Facebook. For me, I'm actually interested in how do we as citizens have a voice in where all this goes so it's not just about those empires dividing up the spoils. So that's what I want to talk about next. So let's accept that Zuckerberg wants to be on that chair, and maybe it's not even bad, or he's not badly motivated, but to me, that's too much power, and it's not the internet that I want. So if we want to stand up to that or shift that, my belief, as I said at the beginning, is we really need to make the health of the internet. And by the health of the internet, I particularly mean the internet as a decentralized force that anyone can do anything on without permission being asked from others, that's free of censorship, and is there for all of us to share. And that was the internet we started with. Maybe it was a blip in time. I don't believe it is or has to be. But I do believe that the health of the internet as a decentralized and open system has to be a mainstream issue that everyone in our society cares about, stands for, that we kind of take for granted as almost a right, but certainly as a resource we all share and need to protect if we want that internet to exist in the future. So that's a kind of daunting task. There are these gazillion dollar corporations who are effectively like governments, you know, colonizing the world, and I'm saying, and I think many of us here are saying, we actually want to, like, limit their power and re-decentralize the internet. So how do you kind of take on that daunting task if you're not competing with them purely as a company, although we do at Mozilla, we also compete in that way. And what I started to do is think about the challenge of making the health of the planet a mainstream issue, which has had some success over the last hundred years, and what can we learn from that? And before I go into that, maybe just one quiz, how many people would sort of consider themselves environmentalists or kind of support the environmental movement just in the audience? There's a kind of low number for Germany, maybe people's arms are, keep your hands up just for a second. And how many people think that at your age your parents would have said the same thing, just keep your hands up. It's a much smaller number. How about your grandparents? So in three generations, the environment, whatever side of climate change you're on, whatever side of environmental issues you're on, has moved from being something that we all agree is a mainstream social issue of social import, worthy of discussion, worthy of debate. It doesn't mean we're always winning or that we have won, but it is something that is legitimately like the economy, like education, something that we can debate and try to balance power and make decisions on as a society. So how did that happen? How did the health of the planet become a mainstream issue? Here I have another black and white picture of a Canadian. This is Sephora Berman, who I was a fan of since I first saw her introduce Ralph Nader 30 years ago. It's a very important global climate change campaign for Greenpeace. Now she's doing more strategy and writing stuff. And it's not the most elegant quote, but it gets to what I think is really important about the modern success of the environmental movement and something that's supported for which is if you're going to protest, you also have to talk to all the players and work out solutions. And really, it means you can't just protest. You also have to deal with markets. You also have to deal with norms. Not so much are they talking about code. So that's important to think about through this history because we started 150 years ago as the industrial revolution is taking off like wildfire where we could have had a far worse planet than we have. We have a very shitty planet, but it was not going in a good direction and certainly there was going to be a need to mitigate. And really early on, and I tell this a little bit from the North American perspective of environmental movement history because that's what I know, from early on you have people like Thoreau, in this case sitting in a cabin in the woods, talking about the value of nature. You've got other people who are talking about growing industrialization and trying to limit it in Europe. So from really the late 19th century, you have the seeds of an environmental movement saying we actually have to think consciously about this relationship between humans and the planet, industry and nature. And that conversation actually starts in a way that we probably don't, for most of us, think of as the environmental movement. But that is really the seeds of it if you look at environmental historians. Now of course, what's going on as Thoreau is in his cabin is not particularly pretty. The cities are building factories and we're starting to clear cut North America. And you see the nice paper mills in the background. I grew up in one of those towns. It still looks like that in the 80s. And so what's happening, even as people are thinking about the environment, is really starting to pillage, especially in North America, for natural resources. In a way, it would be hard to come back from. And what's interesting is, how pixelated is that? It's very pixelated. What's interesting is you actually start to get your first environmental activists in the late 1800s in North America. This is John Muir on the right, who's the founder of the Sierra Club with Teddy Roosevelt. And the Sierra Club is basically a club of campers, kind of like the maker movement. People like to get together and do stuff related to the thing they care about. But who also, one of their great successes is from very early on, the turn of the century basically, with Theodore Roosevelt founded Yosemite National Park and really built the foundations of the American National Park system. So it's kind of interesting that quite early in environmental activism in America, you have a meaningful connection between citizen action, citizen use of the land, and government. Doing something that's meaningful that I believe is an important and meaningful environmental legacy and grows into the conservation movement more broadly, not just in international parks. So from early on, you have a movement that has an impact that is very clear and concrete. That doesn't stop the fact that we're still wrecking the planet, that we're still building chemical plants, that we're building nuclear plants, that we're paving the suburbs of North America, that around the world we're really not treating the planet well. And what's interesting in this kind of inflection point, sort of after the wars in North America, is not only were we pillaging the earth, but we were advertising how awesome it was. And so this is a real ad, I think from the 50s, about the benefits of DDT. The other ad I could have chosen was about how great DDT was for your children, but it wasn't the right resolution. So in a moment where we're just not paying attention to this stuff, and there isn't an environmental movement paying attention to this piece of it, I mean you've got the CR club and you have conservationists, but you don't have the modern environmental movement yet. And so there's some wins in conservation, but still a huge challenge and losses on the general treatment of the planet. And so a real turning point is in the, I guess, 62, the early 60s, Rachel Carson comes out with a book called Silent Spring specifically talking about DDT and other toxins in a way that the industry is just not wanting to have the public know about. And you know, that becomes an inflection point where really companies become untrusted by the public in relationship to the environment. So the modern environmental movement where companies are actually the focus of a lot of the activism as much as the government, and the government really being actually a policy intervening, it's really citizens against companies, is really sparked with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. So you see a next wave emerging. You see Greenpeace and dozens of other organizations starting out and a kind of new kind of activism, a kind of activism that's global as well as creative and in many cases effective. You see ministers of environment and other things, you know, start to emerge. Before the 60s, I've never gone back and totally checked, but I'm pretty sure there is no government on the planet who had a minister of the environment. We didn't have the global summits on the environment that we have had since. And we can question how successful those things are, but really from the 60s this became a legitimate part of our discourse about power and resources and control in our society. That was not the case for our grandparents. We just saw that. That was not the case before Rachel Carson. So there is a meaningful shift that happens from the 60s to the 80s and into the 90s. And really, you know, Western consumerism in both Europe and North America, the environment becomes a core part of the discourse almost where things like recycling are your duty as a citizen. Very boring, but a huge shift in public consciousness and norms. Huge shift in public consciousness and norms. And even to the point where, you know, of course companies and you can be cynical about this as well, really create products that are not only marketed as environmental, but in many ways over the long term are. And what's interesting about this Toyota ad, if you can read it, is that the Sierra Club is one of the people who has given Toyota an award for the Prius. Again, easy to be cynical, but a real shift in discourse. A real shift in discourse is in victory, but it is essential to actually pursue the aims you have and was not possible with the environment, you know, two decades, three decades before this ad was published. And we're now at a spot where the planet is under threat, it's getting hotter, but we actually are in a spot where we can pursue solutions. And I think certainly without that public discourse, without the environmental movement, we would be accelerating at a much faster pace. So small victories, but I think actually huge to imagine that norms and markets and laws have changed so dramatically, really especially in the post-war period, to let us think about protecting the health of the planet. So there's still much work to do, but the health of the planet is a mainstream issue almost everywhere. So, you know, what if we want to do that for the Internet? I believe we have to and that that is urgent and that that is political. So, you know, what does that look like? What is our movement, as I would define it and invite you to think about it? What's the state of it and where do we need to go? So let me just go through that piece briefly. Last Canadian, to a bit of a cheat because he moved to Canada, is William Gibson, who famously said the future is here, just not evenly distributed. And certainly I see part of our job is to keep it distributed both in a decentralized way and from a perspective of equity and power. Now, one might, if you were looking for our Walden Pond, and it's not a perfect example because it's from a Republican grateful dead lyricist, you know, look back to the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace that John Perry Barlow wrote in 93 or 94. And it, you know, it is as poetic, well, maybe not as poetic, certainly as naive and as disconnected from what's going on around him as Thoreau is, where he says, governments of the industrial war world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from cyberspace, blah, blah, blah, blah, leave us alone. And, you know, that was a great sentiment at the time. I certainly had been online for a few years by then, loved that, felt great, like you can't fuck with us. But of course, as that's happening, you know, the empires are already emerging. And they're actually emerging enough that governments are paying attention. And if you can't tell, this is Bill Gates in 98 at his antitrust trial for bundling the browser with the operating system, which ultimately, combined with Mozilla having some impact on some other things, really takes them from being an empire to just a big company, which is fine with me. So, you know, as this is going on, as the Microsoft Empire is in its full swing, a movement is forming, the movement that I see myself as a part of. And Mozilla actually sort of formed in that milieu. And you may not know Mozilla has sort of two hats, where a non-profit and where a player in the market, a company. And we really were formed with this super idealistic vision. This is from our incorporation papers, which I've had to read over and over and over again as I've dealt with IRS tax audits. And it says, Mozilla exists to guard the open nature of the internet. So that's why we started. And of course, other people at that time, you know, also felt the same thing. We need to counterbalance that empire. The internet, software, computers should be forces of freedom and democracy and the people. And we don't actually just need to, you know, we don't need to stand up and protest to make that happen or use antitrust trials, or those are helpful in creating openings. We need to make shit. And that's where open source and free software had a real advantage and a really special fervor, because it was a movement of people who had a cause, but actually could build a part of the world they wanted, at least for that time. And so, you know, what happens in the, through the late 90s and into the early 2000s is that movement starts to actually build the world that it dreams of. So this is early Wikipedia, I guess, 2001. You know, this is Wikipedia, still the 10th or 11th biggest website on the planet and is effectively a free software project. And we would certainly see themselves that way. It has a global grassroots community. So that's a pretty astounding thing early on. Maybe it's like the Sierra Club getting Yosemite. You know, it's a big thing. It lasts for a long time. You know, let's see later in the story if it's enough. And then, you know, same thing happens with Firefox. This is the famous Firefox New York Times ad in 2004 when Firefox 1 comes out, completely, probably the first crowdfunded ad and really kind of early crowdfunding project. We're separate from Mozilla. You know, thousands and thousands of people donate to buy a two-page Sunday New York Times ad to announce Firefox to the world and say to Microsoft, you know, you're on, you're in for a fight. And of course, like Wikipedia, that goes well. The blue part being, you know, where the pure open source Mozilla suite barely really gains any users. And then as Firefox comes out, it just skyrockets, which gives us, and us not just Mozilla, I mean the free software movement. I mean people who stand for an open Internet. A tremendous tool to take back power from Microsoft who was running in its own direction with web standards and the web and re-democratize it, introduce Ajax, introduce real web applications. I mean, all of those things become possible because we fragment the power of the Empire in a genuine and tremendously effective way because they did, as they had 98% market share within an Explorer, have full control and we're taking the Internet in a bad direction, in their direction, in one that wasn't about standards. And we and others changed that. So that was awesome. But that doesn't, with Mark Zuckerberg on the cover of The Economist, feel like where we are now. And I love this XKCD cartoon, I'll stop and let you read it or read it yourself, which is, remember when we prosecuted Microsoft for bundling a browser with an OS? Imagine the future we live in if we've been willing to let one tech company amass that much power. And then the woman says, thank God we nipped that in the bud. We're back in that spot. We're not just back in that spot with the browser, although we are. It's no surprise to anyone that both Firefox, and this is 2013, so it's actually worse now, Firefox and Internet Explorer have gone down in their market share and Chrome has gone up. On one level, that's fine, it's competition, although Google's brutal use of advertising certainly is tough for us to compete with. But, you know, it moves into a place where the vertically integrated browser that if you're logged in completely tracks you and ties you back to everything else is becoming the mainstream way on the desktop of browsing the web. And the privacy oriented browser that doesn't make you log in and even if you do use our private account system doesn't give your data back to Google or Facebook or whoever else it is that you're interacting with, that's declining. It's both a shift in power towards the monopolies and the empires and also a decline in an independent choice. And I would still argue, this is the only promotional plug I will make, that using Firefox is still a political act and is still worth doing for that reason. It's a good browser, but it actually is important to sustain independence on the Internet. So, you know, of course, we're figuring out what we do as Firefox declines. There's lots of things I can say about that in a separate talk, but here we're talking about the movement. And, you know, the other big win we had, the other big national park is Wikipedia, which many people also have questions about. And in many ways it's the same set of forces. I mean, how many people see sort of Wikipedia results in that Google sidebar right now to kind of get a summary? How many people have seen those? Like, it's got to be most people, right? And if you're like me, you may not click through. You may get enough in that paragraph. You may know enough from that. That is dramatically eroding Wikipedia's native traffic, where by taking that open source asset and rolling it into the Google experience, which is great for us as users, as an open source commons, it actually becomes less and less relevant. So, you have the two victories of the earliest phase of the movement, Firefox and Wikipedia, both a little shaky. I mean, still strong, but, you know, shaky. And then, you know, you have the growth of these empires consolidating what is mainstream user experience every day. So, you know, what do we do in that situation? How many people here have seen the life of Brian? Excellent. So, you'll remember the scene, but for those of you who won't, you know, what does the movement do is what this question is. So, what do you do, you know, you keep trotting along with your movement. And if you remember the scene, they do exactly what we shouldn't do. They walk into the Coliseum and Brian, if you recall, has a crush on this girl and she's sitting up there with another set of people and he goes, who's that? And John Cleese says, oh, it's the people's front to Judea. And he says, let's go talk to him. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, where are the Judean people's front? And, you know, then they start calling them names and so on. That's something that often happens as we stand to fight for the freedom of the Internet. It's easy to say my version of net neutrality is better than your version of net neutrality. My browser, my open source thing, my free software versus your open thing, my crypto versus your crypto, you know, law versus code, it's easy for us to sit and nitpick and fight with each other and fight over names. And we do and we look stupid and are getting our asses kicked as we do it. The thing we do in this situation is actually consolidate and look at each other as people in solidarity and as people who can build a future of a decentralized Internet that has people in charge. So if you agree you want to do that, one of the things is actually to know ourselves and we don't have to all think the same thing, but we actually do need to have the same opponents and the same objectives. And we're shitty at that and we're not ambitious enough about it and we don't spend enough time on it. So like if I'm looking around who I see as being a part of the movement, you know, certainly is people who are protesting and standing up against bad laws, like in this case, I think it's an act of protest, sort of victorious, and that's awesome thing and sometimes you need to stand up and fight that way. But I think it's also a movement about building. And so, you know, people who are out there teaching others a code, I see as a part of that movement. People who are out there trying to invent the next phase of IoT and hacking as I see as a part of the movement. People in the maker movement, to me, even though they may be sort of a little bit seem apolitical to you and seem like they're just kind of tinkering with stuff, are very political and are very much a part of the movement. Journalists are part of the movement, as well as whistleblowers are also helpful. And even politicians are part of the movement and hopefully increasingly so. And so, you know, if we think about that group, think that expansively and think about more. Think about librarians. Think about, you know, people who are just afraid of their shit getting ripped off online as potentially part of the movement. So, if we think expansively, we can actually get to the point where we're the health of the Internet is a mainstream issue and where we do have a chance to stand up to what has become a consolidation of power. I'm actually quite optimistic about it. But I'm only optimistic about it if we can take it on all these fronts, take the peace we're personally passionate about and run with it, but know that we have a broader goal and stop nitpicking each other and, frankly, be more ambitious. Believe that, like we have in the past, we can have an influence over where the Internet goes. So, if you want to do that, you know, what are some of the things to do? Some of the things to do are still contribute to the open source projects that are the foundation of this movement, whether that's Firefox or Wikipedia or Linux. Really still critical. I'm now competing with a noise. But, you know, another piece of it is get involved politically. Fight bad laws or fight for good regulations, as here in the case of India, where net neutrality law was or a kind of intervention was made to stop free basics. Or get involved in inventing the future of the Internet of Things in a way that is about hardware being open, data being private. This is a picture as well as this prototype from an open Internet of Things connected home workshop, Mozilla hosted here in Berlin last weekend. And that's going to be a huge and critical part of what we need to build and think through in this movement. And then, like really importantly, play in the market as we also do with our values. We need to be on all those fronts. We need to look at standing up and organizing as citizens for laws. We need to look at, oh, I actually have to say one more thing, we need to build products and we need to kind of get out there in all of the pieces of this. But one thing that really to me is actually most important and least done by this movement and the environmental movement has been great at this is shift norms and understanding. And that's why one of the things we've been doing over the last couple months is a mainstream public education campaign, much like the kind of public education campaigns with TV commercials you used to see around fitness on encryption. Because we want the public, everyone to understand encryption is a part of everyday life. And as governments come to threaten it, it's actually something we value and should stand up for. So that's a piece on the norms. And I think if we can do that, we can build out or we can protect, we can continue to grow an internet that is decentralized. And this to me is a nice image of that although we want to fill in a lot of the blank spaces of all of the people or all the geolocated edits to Wikipedia, something that is made by all of us. And I still believe the internet we want, the internet we can have can be made by all of us, but only if we fragment and decentralize power and put in balance and put in check the emerging empires. So just to conclude, three things to remember and an invitation to engage and come talk to me and work with Mozilla and work with each other. We really are in this moment of too much power and too few hands on the internet. I think understanding that, talking about it and trying to decentralize it are critical right now. Because the people in question, their beloved consumer brands as were the people who made DDT. And I'm not saying they're that evil, I'm saying they've got too much power and we need to counterbalance that. So thinking about that, reflecting on it, see how you think about it and talking with people, critical. Organizing as a movement, whether that's as a maker and building things or as somebody who's standing up against bad laws and stopping them, as in the case of this SOPA photo, absolutely getting engaged in the open internet, treating it as an issue, inviting other people to be involved is critical. And then that third piece is to really have a conversation about the multi-prong nature of an open internet movement, that it is not just a protest movement, that it is not just a maker movement, that it is not just a code movement, it is not just a set of ethical businesses, it is not just an attempt to educate the public and shift new norms, it is and must be all of those things. And I believe if we can do that, we can take our issues and make the mainstream. It may sound very boring, mainstream is a very boring word, but this is a moment we're doing that and when I talk about a moment, I mean the next year, the next 10 years, the next 30 years. This is a moment we're doing that is very political, very urgent, very essential. Or we are going to end up with a shopping mall for the internet and the internet will organize and structure the power of all of human life. So if we want all of human life to be democratic, we want it to actually be something we control. This is something that we need to do and I hope you'll do it together. It's certainly what I am putting all my time into right now and a tremendous amount of Mozilla's resources is to help build this movement. So hopefully that's something we can work on together. Thanks. So if there are any questions, just raise your hands. I think Mark will go on stage again. And just let me know who you are. I would like to look on this issue from a customer perspective. So I just opened Google Maps and it showed me when my flight is leaving today. And this gives a big user experience. So they have the data. But what I would do is sharing with you also the same data what Google and Facebook know. So I need an entity between me and the internet somehow which is more democratic because you need this data and then it's not an asset which Google has. Because just working on the privacy, it's not the only solution. We need a solution which uses the data in the interest of the customer. Maybe also financed by the customer and not by someone else. So I think what you're saying and not if you're right because it's kind of breaking up is if you want to actually liberate yourself or have privacy from Google and Facebook but you get value from there being aggregate data because it's predictive and all of that really awesome stuff, how can we do that? Is that sort of what you're asking? I mean, certainly I think it's a good question. It's a right challenge. We've tried in a number of ways to take shots at that. Some of our early experiments in advertising which is about actually leaving your data on your machine with your browser which is actually a good way to aggregate your data because it's local and you control it and then comparing some anonymized versions of that with other people's data. We didn't break through with that to provide the user value we wanted but other people are trying to do similar things. So I think looking at the right balance of local data storage of your rich history combined with anonymized cloud information is an area that people are working and that's the kind of breakthroughs that are needed to get to that. And it is where the movement and the market piece come together. We need companies that are activists about these topics and care about users who want privacy to be in the market commercially for that stuff to be real. It's important and that is part of what we're working on. So any more questions? Perhaps? No, I think that's it. So thank you very much. Have a great end of Republic. Go to the party.
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These are dark days for the web. Monopolies, walled gardens, surveillance and fear have spread across the internet. On the flip side, there is a new wave of open emerging: a grassroots movement for online freedom, creativity and opportunity for all.
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10.5446/20663 (DOI)
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I'm really, really excited to announce Marta Bakovits. Sorry, Marta Bakovits is here with us today. I'm particularly excited to announce him because he is currently reinventing body percussion. You could say he's the upcoming rock star of digital music performance art and has developed a new way to translate movement, brainwaves and heartbeats into music, turning everyday objects into instruments. Please give a big warm welcome to Marta Bakovits' Music as the Instrument. Hello everybody, my name is Matan. I came here from Tel Aviv to talk to you about what I do, which is basically translating physical signals into music. I'm going to show some of the prototypes and inventions I've made and talk a little bit about working with the special needs population to enable people with disabilities to play in new ways. And also at the end of the talk I'm going to demo something I'm working on these days which translates movement into music and hopefully we're going to play some music on stage today as well. So let me start by really going from the top to the very beginning. My background, as you can see, this is some of the things we're going to talk about soon. This is kind of like a spoiler, full screen, right? This is kind of a spoiler of some of the things we're going to talk about. But my background is actually in music and film. I came from art and for many years that's what I did. I was a screenwriter and a director and I was traveling the world as a musician and I was happy. But then gradually I started feeling like something was missing. This little voice inside me kept telling me that my actions and my resources and my energy could be spent doing something more meaningful, something that would influence people's lives directly and help improve other people's lives. And as I started thinking about what that could be, I reached the conclusion that two things were missing. One was that sense of impact and meaning. And the other one was a sense of innovation, of making things that are new, that are unheard of or that are actually innovative in their field. And so without knowing too much about what I was doing, I decided to start a company. This kind of feeling of not really knowing who you are, that kind of identity crisis, not knowing what you want to be when you grow up, was foreign for me because ever since I was a little kid and knew I wanted to be a filmmaker and a musician and that's what I became. And when I started this company, I called it Shift because it was a shift for me. It was a change in my direction in life. And I decided to focus on innovation for purpose, meaning how to use technology, how to harness technology and innovation for positive impact for important causes. And for the first year, 2014, of this company, that's exactly what we did. We worked with startups, we worked with organizations, nonprofits, municipalities, even a hospital. And all of our projects were about merging technology and impact. It was a very, very educational year where I learned a lot of new things, but I also started getting into this kind of scene of innovation in startups. And I was fascinated, especially by one thing. And that thing was hackathons. For those of you who don't know what a hackathon is, it's basically an event where people come together from different disciplines and different backgrounds. Here you'll find developers, designers, makers, and they all build things together in a very condensed period of time, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours straight, nonstop. And once you build these things, you come and present them in the end of the hackathon. You show what you've made and judges award you some kind of prize to the best teams. And this format was amazing for me. I started experimenting with different things I could do at a hackathon. Really hackathons, they have some kind of center. It could be a new technology, it could be a theme where people build around that theme and try and kind of create different things for it. And what I found to be my theme was music technology. And this pattern started to emerge. I would come to a hackathon, I would start a team, we would build some kind of music technology prototype and win. And as this win started to accumulate, my life started changing because instead of focusing on the work I was doing with clients, I started focusing on the work I was doing with music technology. And the more dominant that became, the more the company shifted from working with clients to doing in-house projects. And I want to show you some of these prototypes and inventions. So the first thing, and also the first hackathon I ever did, made me realize that what I'm fascinated by is the relationship between music, technology, and the human body. How can we translate our physical body into music, into sound? And I started making this distinction in my mind between what we could do physically to control our body, like moving our hands, moving our head, using our voice. We could use these things musically, we could control them. But also there are other things in our physical body, more biological things that we can't really control, like our heartbeat or our brain activity. These things are musical, at least for me. They seem very musical. But on the other hand, you might be able to influence them, but you can't really control them. So how do you make music with an instrument you can't really control? I'm going to show an example of each of these now. The first one would be the first hackathon I ever went to, which was for Google Glass. Do you guys remember Google Glass? It was an experiment for Google to launch the wearable device, a glass device that would basically have a camera and a microphone and all these different sensors on it. It was a bit early, a bit premature. And when it came to Israel, there was this big hackathon for Google Glass, and it was the first time any of us has ever seen it. And when I was there, I noticed that these different groups started forming, and they were forming around ideas that I felt were kind of awkward. For example, one group was trying to make a dating application using Google Glass. They reasoned that if you're at a date and you're not sure what to say or what to do, well, you have a camera and you have a microphone and you have this little screen, so the Google Glass could tell you what to say. If you've ever been on a date, you know it's a horrible idea. Why would you go with Google Glass to a date and say what the screen tells you to say? I wouldn't take Google Glass to a date, but I might take it with me on stage. So I started thinking, what could I do with Google Glass on stage? And what caught my mind, my curiosity, was that every Google Glass has this sensor called gyroscope that basically tracks your head movements so it knows where your head is at every given point. How could you translate those movements into music? So I built the Google Glass Glass Beats, which is basically an application that turns the Google Glass into a musical instrument. I'm going to show you a little video of that very first music technology prototype I made. If you look at the screen behind me in this video, you see there's a little dot that's moving. It's moving with latency and it's tracking my head movements to show where my head is at any given point. And with this dot, I can control different effects on my voice. Right now we can activate effects on my voice, like so. One, one, one. You see the dot moving? When it's moving on the x-axis, it controls reverb. When it moves on the y-axis, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, it controls delay. It can also loop my voice. It can also loop my voice. It can also loop my voice. It can also loop my voice. It can also loop my voice. Okay, Glass. Drop the beat. Okay, Glass. Drop the beat. Okay, Glass. So, this was the very first prototype I made and it won the Google Glass Acrofond. We actually won that dating application for the Google Glass. And that really got my appetite going. I was like, all right, we can make all these different things. And especially, again, I was fascinated by the relationship with the physical body. But if this was controlled by my head movements, allowing me to loop and create layers, control effects using head movements, now came the time to try and use something more biological, something you can't really control. And so, I started working with EEG. To those of you who don't know, EEG is basically a way to measure electrical activity in the brain. So, you can try and detect different brain waves, different types of brain activity using this technology. And I teamed up with an Israeli startup called Neurostear that developed a new way to do signal processing for EEG. To detect more data from brain waves and brain activity. And if you look at this graph behind me, you could see one of the things that inspired me to try and use this technology. Because all this red and yellow data on this graph is basically brain activity and it's very chaotic. But the guy who we're measuring here is an experienced meditator. And that part where there's nothing but a very thick red line is when that guy went into very deep trance. So, he was able to consciously manifest change in his brain activity. And that got me thinking, this might become an instrument. This might become musical neurofeedback, using neurofeedback to create music. And the way this came about, the first prototype, was working with Sefi Udi. Sefi Udi is a paraplegic man. So, he's basically constrained to a wheelchair and he's a very inspiring individual. Before he became paraplegic, he used to play guitar. Ever since then, he missed playing guitar. He missed playing music, but he couldn't really do it with any conventional instrument. The EEG was a great opportunity for Sefi to try and express himself musically. So teaming up with Neuersteer, we created this EEG musical device that translated Sefi's and anyone's basically brain activity into music. Later that day, this was a hackathon as well called Tom, and later that day, Sefi was on stage in front of a lot of people just like now, and he was playing music. Also, he was the only person I've ever met who was able to consciously make the music go on and off. His mind was so sharp and focused that he could say something like, now I'm going to stop the music for 20 seconds and the music would stop. Me personally, I played many shows with EEG and I could never do that, because for most of the time and for most of the people, this is very hard to control. The most you can do is try and relax or get very agitated so the EEG could kind of measure your alpha brain waves and detect how awake you are, but for any other use, it's pretty limiting. This is why I thought maybe we can take this one step further and make a musical hat. The idea with the musical hat was to combine both things. See the Google Glass was a wearable device, but it was also already made wearable device. I didn't make it, I was just using it, and I was curious to see what it could do if I start from scratch. So we took this designer hat that was made especially for us by Inspirala and we added two components. The first thing was a gyroscope, just like the sensor in the Google Glass that could track my head movements. And the other thing were these buttons you see on screen that were enabling anyone to basically loop themselves and create layers, just like the demo I showed you. But the twist for this is that inside the hat, I also put the EEG reader. So now while you're doing loops and controlling music using head movements, your head was controlling, consciously controlling the music, and your brain waves, your brain activity, were unconsciously creating music as well, basically merging the physical and the biological elements of making music using the body. This prototype was made at an event called Music Tech Fest, which is this pretty incredible event to anyone interested in this field, and it's happening at the end of this month in May in Berlin. So you should probably check it out. This next prototype was also made at Music Tech Fest, this time in London, both of which are one Music Tech Fest for wearable devices. This is the prototype of a glove that measures your heartbeat. So just like the brain waves, I could convert the pulse of a person into music. And gradually, as I accumulated these different kinds of prototypes and inventions, I started creating shows that were based around the physical body making music. These shows were mainly made for big stages. This for example is a Microsoft stage, a big event for Microsoft. And for this show, we had both the EEG brain waves and the heartbeat sensor. I was playing an electric guitar, there was a drummer, there was a BGDoubler, and we were running the whole thing through water and sand to create these geometric patterns that you see on screen behind us in real time. At another show for Google, I just went on stage without any instruments, and all of the music was made with the body. One person was meditating on stage and kind of affecting his brain waves live, while another girl was running on stage and increasing her heartbeat live, and I was using motion to create more music, and all of the music was done using nothing but the body. Using the same technologies, I started experimenting with interactive art. So this for example, one, this is a RoRim. This is an interactive installation I made for Hurtz-Leah Museum, which is basically like this alien cocoon shape, and when you stand in front of it, it feedbacks your movements, your body, and it gives it light and sound. But the interesting thing about it is that if two people stand on both sides of this, it doesn't only mirror one of them, it mirrors both of them. So once they sync and start moving in the same way at the same time, the whole thing comes alive, the lights and the music, climax, and basically it measures how in sync you are with another person in your movements. This kept going. I made this interactive kind of a dance thing with video mapping and motion gestures, but as I was working on these projects, I started thinking, wait a minute, what about positive impact? I remember how for the first year I started Chift and I was all about, yeah, let's do something that matters, let's help people. But a lot of these things were back to just having fun. Musical hats and dancers, it's pretty cool, but how are we helping people? How are we changing their lives? So if you think back about Sefi Udi, the paraplegic, the more I thought about this, the more I realized this connection between the physical body and music means the most for people with disabilities. This is Rachele. She's a young girl from Jerusalem and she has this amazing positive energy about her, even though she's both cognitively and physically impaired. She can do basically nothing, almost at all. She can't really move, she can't really speak, at least not consciously. The main thing Rachele could do other than smile is to wave her hand. And when my friend, Eris Simon, came to me and said, I want to create a musical instrument for Rachele. I want her to play music. That was a great challenge for me because basically all Rachele could do was move her hand. That's what I call a one-button machine because she can't even really fine tune her movements. She's just moving. How could you really make music using nothing but that? How could you make music accessible for a person like Rachele? What we did was we created a glove. This glove, this is the first version of the glove. There were more versions later. And this glove has three different modes. So the first mode for the glove was drum mode. Basically every time Rachele hits a surface, it creates first a kick sound and then a snare sound. That way when she would play it time after time, she could play drums like this. This was very empowering because she was able to start experimenting with rhythm. Nothing but hand movements, one hand moving could enable her to play drums. The second mode was DJ mode where I basically took Rachele's favorite song, which is this very uplifting, positive song about the Messiah. And I basically cut it into different segments, different bars. And so instead of just passively listening to the song, Rachele could trigger the next part of the song in time. She could choose when to bring the next part of the song in. So this listening experience also became an empowering, active, participatory experience for Rachele. And the third mode wasn't even musical. I took Rachele's mother to my home studio and I recorded her reading two of Rachele's favorite children books. I then took those recordings and I cut them into individual sentences. That way Rachele could trigger the next part of the story whenever she wanted to. And instead of being completely dependent on her mother, she could use this glove to read herself a story using her mother's voice and her own movements. Inspired by what this allowed me to experiment with and what it allowed other people to feel, I decided to take this one step further. And I came up with this theory called the Music Accessibility Pyramid. At the top of the pyramid, you have professional musicians. These are people who have technical abilities, they have equipment, they know musical theory, and they spend money on music and they also make their money for music. Then you have people who are hobbyists. They have all the same things, but usually they don't really make music. For money, they just really spend their money on it because it's their hobby. Then you have people who are not musicians at all. Basically thinking, oh, I should have started playing guitar when I was 14 or I could never drum. And all these people are obviously wrong because if they wanted to, any of us could just pick up an instrument at any given point and start playing. But we tend to forget about the special needs populations. People who might want to play have all the passion and dedication. They might be extremely talented as well, but they have these challenges preventing them from playing music, cognitive challenges, physical challenges, making it much more difficult to experience the gift of music. And my theory was, what if we connect the two ends of the pyramid? What happens if we try and merge the professional musicians and the special needs population? And this became an event called Disco Tech. Disco Tech stands for disability, community, technology. And it was the first event of its kind in the world dedicated to the creation of music technology for people with special needs. It was produced by my company Shift and also by an Israeli NGO called Imagine. I made a video about this event and I'd like to show it to you. Are you guys ready? All right. Disco Tech stands for disability, community, technology. The idea was to take four musicians with special needs to enable them to fulfill all their fantasies and musical dreams. We have four different musicians, we're four different challenges, four different teams working on four different floors to create four working prototypes. I was born without a hand. I've always wanted to be able to play so I can perform by myself. The main challenge was to build the actual extension and at the same time to make the feel and the sound of the actual strumming of the guitar pick to sound like an actual arm. When I was 18, I went through a snowboarding accident. Since then I'm on a wheelchair. We are trying to combine few instruments together. And our Monica and a microphone and a special kind of guitar. Everything will be connected to a looper. It's all modular that you can actually disconnect and connect it back. So my project here is to be a one-man band. Roy now is 18 years old. We discovered when it was 15 months that he has a brain tumor. After the operation we discovered that he's blind. Also he became autistic and after two months he started to play because he's handicapped and he has a weakness on his left side. He plays with his right hand with four fingers and the left hand with only one finger. What we did is we used one finger he has on his left hand and whenever he hits a note we turn it into a chord by supplying him the ability to set the type of the chord using his legs. Offal Green is a very talented electronic musician. He was a student of mine. He has Machado Joseph disease. When I met him he could still move a little bit and talk a little bit and after a while his situation worsened. We will create a system that will send MIDI notes to the program so he can write scores. There's going to be the camera that follows the eyes, functions of the joystick. He can use his right pinkie. This is going to be his click. And the music that he hears inside his head can get on the computer and from there to your ears. We have here 3D printers, electronics and Arduino. Everybody's a musician and a programmer and a mathematician. And designers and the most talented, brilliant people. Wow. It's kind of fun. You know, like I'm hacking and in the background people are jamming in different, you know, prototypes all over. It's really fun. All the people that came here, they are volunteer. It's a project for them and for me it's more than a project. It's my son and this is his life. These 4 people represent so many people out there that will need these things and can benefit from them in the long term. It's good for people with special needs but it's also good for hobbyists. It's also good for children and it's also good for professional musicians. The main goal and ambition here is to make music accessible to as many people as possible. I've never even thought that I could play. I've never even thought about it. Music has been my psychologist. It's been my lover. It's been my best friend. It saved me. It really saved me. I think music is the most powerful medium, you know, in the world. And when you combine that with technology, which is a massive enabler, I think that's the perfect blend. The main idea behind this event is to create continuity without boundaries. I really hope it's not the last event. I really hope that it will grow, not just in Israel but everywhere. Disco Tech is going to help a lot of people. Rock on. Thank you guys. So one second. Going back to the music accessibility pyramid for a second. This event was successful in some ways because it inspired a lot of people. And I went on this tour. And my theory was basically that if you take this pyramid and you connect the dots, what happens is the thing reverses. What helps a person with a great challenge will definitely benefit people with a lesser challenge, people who have never played, people for whom it's a hobby, and of course, people whom all of their lives are revolving around music. But also in other ways, I learned a lesson from Disco Tech because as I started going on a public speaking tour, speaking about this all over the world, I saw how many people were inspired and touched. But I also realized how difficult it is to bring these kinds of inventions, these kinds of prototypes into the mass market. How difficult it is to actually make them into products that assist and help and empower a lot of people all over the world. And the reason is money. This is a niche market. How could you make these inventions, these prototypes, into fully-formed products if they're not commercially viable? This got me thinking a lot about what's the next step. Because I thought originally I should have more of these events all over the world. And I did make a lot of contacts with people wanting to make these events. But the more I thought about this, the more I realized if we make more events and more prototypes, more inventions, but we never make the products that actually get to the hands of the people who need them, what are we doing? And this brings us to today. And I'm very excited for this talk, not only because this is an amazing event. And you're a great audience, but also because I want to announce something I've been working on kind of secretly for a while. And it's two different projects. The first of which, the bigger one, is the evolution of the company and of the vision. It is on its way to becoming an innovation lab. But it's not just an innovation lab. It's an innovation lab for positive impact. It's an innovation lab meant to create things that would empower and help people and solve challenges. I've been fortunate enough to go on these tours at the MIT Media Lab, NYU Innovation Lab, Harvard Innovation Lab, Google X. I saw all these people working on inspiring projects and I asked them questions and I've been seeking the advice of people much more experienced than I am. And I'm hoping that by 2017 we're going to launch these labs, talking to potential partners now and dreaming about making this a reality. And in the meantime, I'm working on my latest project, which I have with me right here. And I'm going to demonstrate for you guys. Are you ready? Are you ready? Come on. All right. Okay. So, this project is called AirStreamant. And it's the first project for the lab. This is a prototype, obviously. It kind of looks like a prototype. Let's see if the sound even works, all right, one second. Give me some volume. All right. So what this does is basically, this is the accumulation of what I've been talking about. I again went to Music Techfest this time in Sweden and I created this prototype for an instrument that's controlled by gestures, by hand movements. Because I realized this might be the most efficient, the most intuitive way for people who don't play music to play music, to learn music, understand music. This spatial, intuitive movement could be what makes music accessible in a whole new way. And once we made this prototype, it won the hackathon and we got into this incubation program called Music Bricks, which is part of the European Union. And we're now finishing the incubation program and going into the next level. And I'm going to try and do a little demo for you guys. Hopefully it works. Let's check it out. All right. All right. Let's see. All right, thank you very much for your time. So just to finish off, thank you guys, just to finish off, I just want to leave you with this one simple message. Find the sweet spot of what you're excited about, what you would do if no one would pay you, what you think about when you get up in the morning, and try and find where that meets what you think could benefit the world, what the world needs. And when you find that sweet spot, go for it and make a change. My name is Matan, thank you very much. Enjoy. Thank you very much.
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Matan's incredible journey from musician & film maker to award winning inventor started with the realization that his actions could have more 'real, positive impact on the world'. In the past 2 years he has developed ways to translate heartbeats, brainwaves and motions into music while turning everyday objects such as hats, glasses and gloves into instruments, working to empower people with special needs to express themselves in new ways, speaking and performing on stages worldwide and building interactive installations for museums & galleries. As the founder of Shift, a company which specializes in positive innovation, Matan is now laying the foundations for a new kind of lab - one which works with emerging technologies while focusing on their potential to do good in the world. During this fascinating talk Matan will not only share his story, insights and inventions, but also perform a live demo of his latest prototype, which enables anyone to play music using nothing but hand movements.
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10.5446/20666 (DOI)
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The speech will be around 20 minutes and then there's a possibility to ask some questions. Hi, thanks very much for coming to hear me talk about the problem with trolleys. My name is Maya, I'm a default candidate at the University, Leuphana University, where I've just started a PhD on this topic. I'm also the director of applied research at Tactical Tech here in Berlin. But when I speak today, I'm not speaking as an engineer or a technologist, I'm speaking as a cultural studies scholar from a science and technology perspective. So it's interesting to be part of this stage on mobility, considering some of the talks that have already happened here today. So I'm going to talk about the problem with trolleys. But before trolleys, I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with a dog in Wales. A couple of months ago, I caught a funny story on Twitter. And it was about how a dog had somehow found its way onto a highway, a motorway in the north of Wales. And it was running around and it was very distressed by the high speed traffic. And the truckers, the motorists were also very distressed by this dog on the highway. And the police got involved and they said, kill the dog if you have to. If you have to run over the dog, do it because it's putting motorists at risk. And you have trucks with 16 wheels and things. So I think the dog got run over. But the next day, Sky News picked up the story and there was all of this social media outrage about killing the dog. So you can actually see it quite well on this. So you can see the kinds of comments. People were very, very upset that a dog was killed. And they didn't know who's pet it was, but then the fact that it belonged to somebody, the feelings of the dog, the responsibility of the police, all of these things sort of came into the picture. And I was reading the story and it was sort of exactly around some of the problems we have to confront when we think about what does it mean to engage with the trolley problem. So what is the trolley problem? I'm going to talk about the trolley problem as a legal scholar called Judith Thompson has spoken about it. Many people have written about the trolley problem. It's a long description, but I put it up here and I'm going to read it. And I quote from a 1985 article actually about it. Some years ago, Philippa Foote drew attention to an extraordinarily interesting problem. Suppose you are the driver of a trolley. The trolley rounds a bend and they come into view ahead five track workmen who have been repairing the track. The track goes through a bit of a valley and at that point the sides are steep, so you must stop the trolley if you are to avoid running the five men down. You step on the brakes, but alas, they don't work. Now you see suddenly a spur of track leading off to the right. You can turn the trolley onto it and thus save the five men on the track straight ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foote has arranged that there is one track workman on that spur of track. He can no more get off the track in time than the five can, so you will kill him if you have to turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally permissible for you to turn the trolley? Just so that I don't have to spend all of this time talking, I also have a little video by a scholar called Patrick Lin who has done a lot of work on this. It is just a little clip from a video which sort of applies this trolley problem to the context of driverless cars. The trolley problem is what is being used to train machine learning software in driverless cars. I hope this works and does sound. You find yourself boxed in on all sides by other cars. Suddenly a large heavy object falls off the truck in front of you. Your car can't stop in time to avoid the collision, so it needs to make a decision. Go straight and hit the object, swerve left into an SUV, or swerve right into a motorcycle. Should it prioritize your safety by hitting the motorcycle, minimize danger to others by not swerving, even if it means hitting the large object and sacrificing your life, or take the middle ground by hitting the SUV, which has a high passenger safety rating? So what should the self-driving car do? But now there's a motorcyclist wearing a helmet to your left and another one without a helmet to your right. Which one should your robot car crash into? If you say the biker with the helmet because she's more likely to survive, then aren't you penalizing the responsible motorist? If instead you say the biker without the helmet because he's acting irresponsibly, then you've gone way beyond the initial design principle about minimizing harm. And the robot car... Okay, so there's a much longer video on YouTube which you can take a look at, and that kind of tells you about all of the different scenarios that a driverless car may have to face. Judith Thompson goes on to, in this very long and interesting paper, work through the trolley problem in different ways. What the trolley problem basically asks you to do is to actually engage with something quite complicated, which is, is it okay to sacrifice one person or five? A version of it bystander at the switch changes the position. You are not the trolley driver, but you're just a bystander. How should you make a decision? Are you responsible if you're just standing there and you have the opportunity to change the course of things? What is your responsibility? And transplant takes it into a different realm where you have a doctor who has the opportunity to save the lives of five people versus one young healthy person. These are all kind of like really impossible thought experiments that Judith Thompson and other philosophers have set up. But they bring in a very interesting sort of contextual factor into thinking about these things because these are not happening in isolation just randomly. There is no track workmen on a track. These are all kind of tracks and workmen and work people in very specific contexts. What if you knew personally, one of the people who was tied on one side, but you didn't know any of the other five people who were on the other side. The Fat Man is an opportunity to push over somebody very large who may stop the trolley on the track. The loop in the track sort of like extends the space of the track. So all of these situations sort of force people to think about is the outcome important or how you address the problem. Is that important? Is letting die the same as saving the same as killing? So this is a test that's being applied in, as I said, in the development of driverless cars, Google, BMW, Tesla, all of these people. What's my problem with it? There are a couple of problems. The first is that we're talking about a situation where human beings in the near future are going to have to be in vehicles that they share spaces with. If you read Tesla's ad copy, there's these shared spaces of fluidity and smooth control between humans and machines. And actually we're already there. Every time you get on a plane, you're already giving over control to a machine. Every time people go up in rockets, a lot of the stuff is done by the machine itself. So we already trust machines to do these things. Of course, in the case of planes and rockets, you have highly skilled and trained people, not people like you and me who are possibly not very good drivers. I, of course, am an excellent driver and I will know how to solve all of these complex ethical issues. But there's a reason and there's a history to how we trust machines and how we think that machines don't make mistakes, but human beings do. And that's one of the biggest rationales for why we even need self-driving cars, because human beings do make mistakes. They drive inefficiently and cars will be accurate because they can be, or driverless cars can be accurate because they will be programmed to be so. However, Madeleine Ellish is a scholar in the United States who's done a lot of work into the history of dealing with error between machines and humans and finds that in cases of accidents, there is a tendency to blame humans and praise machines. So the machine never really makes a mistake. It's the human that makes a mistake and this is born out. The human has to take responsibility. This is not a problem except that we're not dealing with just a regular car. We're dealing with machines that we think are programmed in a certain way to achieve certain functions. And there's accountability which has to somehow be stretched between the human and the machine. She talks about this concept of model crumple zones, like you have a crumple zone in a car accident situation. And she says that the human being tends to get caught in this because we just believe that the machine is all powerful. And the thing that bothers me about it is that somehow we've used this concept of ethics and made it something that the law, in this case in particular, I think the American law can deal with. And I'm not so comfortable with the fact that ethics becomes a question of American tort law, negligence law, the fact that insurance companies have to know how to deal with situations of error and mistake and accidents in self-driving cars. And additionally, that ethics has become a problem of engineering. I'm not sure that we're actually at that point where we can say we have the answers because if you even look at the trolley problem, I mean I'm curious why they pick this and not anything else. And that's kind of part of my work now, is to try and get to why this problem and not something else. Was it just something that could be programmed easier and better? And I found this quote which I really like, which kind of speaks to the law being able to deal with human error and machine error. There's statistics going around that in accidents that Google self-driving car has had, accidents that Google self-driving car has been in, the problem has been the human beings around it and other cars. So the driverless car has been driving around Mountain View and it's been rear-ended a number of times, but that's because the human beings in other cars have not expected the driverless car to be so accurate. We all know that when we drive, we take risks, we take calculated risks. There are margins of error and we keep stretching that margin of error depending on the situation and the context, depending on who's in the car with us if we're alone. But the driverless car is programmed to be really precise. And there is a whole lot of gray zone right now and uncertainty about how do you actually regulate and monitor what error means in humans and in machines. And I think the, I mean, there's, so there's a cluster of issues around error and how we deal with machine error and human error. I don't think we've worked that out, but there's a point slightly beyond that which interests me as well, which is how does that lead us to a place of accountability? And I think accountability is a much bigger question than actually ethics as it's been framed here. I think that there's been a lot of emphasis on machine learning algorithms and algorithms generally where many of us in this sort of space are quite familiar with workaround algorithms and discussions about algorithms. But I think there's a way in which the discussion of algorithms tends to atomize things and say that, well, that's where the conversation is. The problem is the algorithm and not anything else. And I think that actually we, if you move outside of just this car, you know, trundling down this, you know, hypothetical road and having to deal with these impossible situations of fat men and, you know, bystanders. If we move outside of that and go beyond and behind the algorithm to understand where do these things come from, then I think we're kind of already in a very different sort of space. We're not talking about cars and trolleys anymore. And therefore, I look to the work of people like Langdon Winner, who asked more than 30 years ago, do artifacts have politics? And he's got a really interesting body of work that looks at how architects who built a lot of the infrastructure around the city of New York, how their values come into the building of architecture and technology. So tunnels that connected New York to its suburbs were built at a certain height to prevent buses from being able to go to kind of more affluent suburbs like Long Island. At that time, when New York was being built, there were only certain kinds of people who traveled by bus. They tended to be poorer and they tended to be black. So there was kind of regulation and values kind of built into the design of an architecture of the city. And I think that a similar kind of thing is happening in the context of self-driving cars, that we have to kind of look behind the algorithms a little bit and look at the networks of humans, of institutions, of motivations, of money, and even signs and symbolism into why are we even going down a certain path? I mean, if we think about the case of Volkswagen, there was a defeat device in Volkswagen, but there were people who actually programmed that defeat device to drive cars. And the work of Bruno Latour is also really interesting. And the French philosopher Latour teaches us, I think, to think about power, but in a way that's not just about humans, but recognizes that we are embedded along with so many different artifacts and objects, surfaces, interfaces that have histories and have antecedents, and to ask what is their role and where do they come from. So there's a very interesting chapter in his book, or section in his book, where he talks about a speed bump and a stop sign approaching a school. And he says, the speed bump is actually just an inanimate object that's been built into the road to slow the car down. But the stop sign when you're approaching a school says school ahead 30 miles per hour. There is nothing else that's actually making your car slow down, but there's a whole bunch of reasons behind why that sign has influence. You could risk the suspension of your car and just go really fast over the speed bump. You could take a moral risk by not paying attention to the sign, which says school ahead, slow down. But, I mean, those are just two examples. I mean, he brings in all other kinds of objects and says these objects have their histories as well. And so I think they're kind of unpacking how are these algorithms developed in these self-driving cars? What are the sort of contexts? Who are these engineers? Who are these companies that are actually taking the concept of ethics and saying, oh, we have the answer? We're going to tell you how to do ethics, and this is how the law is going to regulate it, and this is how machines are going to figure it out for us. And I think I'm going to end by also calling into question the problem of ethics itself. Like, why has ethics become this default? And what kind of ethics? Who's ethics? From the kinds of ethical problems that the trolley problem is about. These come from kind of a Kantian tradition from consequentialist and virtue ethics that come from a very sort of patriarchal Judeo-Christian framework. And we have ethics that come from many other different places. Feminist scholars have sort of really pointed this out and said that there are perhaps ethics that come from collectives. There are ethics that come from networks and from other sorts of notions. Should we be looking to those? So maybe ethics is the wrong framework. I sort of think about the dog being mourned in Wales, and I fear for the people of Wales, because I don't think they're ready for driverless cars or the robot apocalypse, and frankly, neither am I. But I hope to be able to work it out in the next three years. And I'm going to end with something that's quite familiar to maybe people who've been to other parts of the world and encountered situations of driving. And it's kind of a funny video, I suppose. And I mean, so this is, for those of you who've been, this is India, but this could be pretty much anywhere in the world. And I think that there's a sort of a very different kind of logic and a very different kind of system. Driverless cars are not meant to function in this environment, I think, but I think this is actually the reality of where the majority world is. And there's a way in which kind of logic and trolleys stop working. And I don't know if we're ever going to get to a point where we can actually figure out or understand how this system works. And let's see if we do. I'm waiting to find out. So thank you very much. I'm really happy to open this up to questions. Thank you very much for this interesting speech. And now we do have around 10 minutes for questions from the audience. So please start. Where's the first question? There. Hi, my name is Mark. Very interesting discussion. I think it touches on philosophy on a very deep level. And I'm wondering at what point is this an issue when most cars are driverless, in which case they can interact with each other and make these certain types of choices based on a network of sorts. If you can comment on that. I can actually only just speculate. I don't think that I know enough about it. I would like to know more about it. But I think that pretty much what you read is a combination of what journalists in Wired or The Guardian know and some very sort of technical papers that are coming out. I think this is a field that's being developed as well. People who are in these environments can probably speak to it a lot more. But I think that it is the scale is only going to increase and go up and it's going to become more and more complex. So I can't answer that technically, but it terrifies me to think of how we don't know how to sort this out. Okay, thank you. Some more questions, please. But I don't know. There are a lot of people here who are also part of the mobility track and kind of possibly work in some of these industries. So if you actually have an answer to the gentleman or something more technical to contribute, please do. Hi, my name is Caroline. Thank you for the interesting lecture. Maybe just a brief follow up. What I understood where you were hinting at is if all cars are without drivers, then there's no danger because there's no humans in the cars. But then there are still pedestrians or at least, I mean, there will be people outside. So I don't see how it would actually change. Maybe you can explain a bit more why you were asking your question. Yeah, so I was more interested in when does this cease to be a problem on a highway, for example, where maybe there are no pedestrians in the case, in the very particular case that we saw in the video where a car had to make a choice between running into an SUV or a motorcyclist. In which case, let's say 50 years in the future when they're all automated, they're all driverless cars with people in them. In this case, can't all the cars to the left, to the right and behind this truck make a decision together in which case this ethics issue ceases to be an issue. Thanks for that Caroline, for that clarification. First, I don't know if 50 years in the future everything is going to be automated. There will be no humans and that we should do things now based on that assumption. The other is that I think a lot of these systems, not at the consumer level, but at, you know, possibly at a military level, a lot of these things already do talk to each other in a way and share information where you sometimes don't have a human in the loop as they say and, you know, sort of the development of cars. It's possible that at some point you will have some things where there's no human in the loop, but I think that there's always going to be human in the loop, at least, not always. I think there's going to be human in the loop design a fair bit because people are recognizing that this is an issue. You cannot have, you cannot completely take humans out. So, for example, Tesla definitely has this in their design of human in the loop, whereas Google recently had some issues with the California law because they've designed their cars to be completely driverless. And the California law a couple of months ago, maybe late last year, was that you cannot have a completely driverless car. There has to be a human in the machine that can override it or, you know, in some way. So I don't know if we're there yet. And yes, and I'm uncertain about whether we can actually make that decision for people who will be around 50 years in the future and say that, yeah, I hope that clarifies. Your comment was a great segue to my question, actually, which is, I'm Jennifer Shulta. Oh, hi, Jennifer. Hi. My question was, to what extent can humans override the decision making of the machine? Do we have that feature now or not? You mentioned certain designs Tesla versus Google have the human in the loop. Yeah. But when and how can a human override machine decision making? I think that there are some instances where they can. Unfortunately, I don't know the detail and I would love to have anyone from Tesla is here and wants me to, you know, wants to give me some time in your lab or to talk to scientists. I'd be really happy to. I don't know, but there may be people in the room who know more specifically where and how and in what instances. I'm trying to glean as much as I can from the research papers, but I'm not an engineer. So, thank you. Thanks. I'm wondering. So this question about the Charlie problem seems to be really the most popular question to ask whenever you talk about self driving cars. And I was wondering, you were slightly hearing of that. If what do you think, or maybe you have some ideas about this? What other questions could we discuss about upcoming developments? What are maybe questions we should discuss instead? Do you have some suggestions just to freshen things up? Thank you. Well, actually, I mean, I think towards the end, the stuff I talked about in terms of accountability, but more. What are the sort of contexts and environments in which the stuff is being developed? It could be self driving car today. It's something else tomorrow. I mean, there's all kinds of, I'm sure, very useful, but also utterly ludicrous technology that's being developed. And I'm personally, I think, more interested in questions around where is this coming from? Who's making the decisions? Where is the money coming from and where is it going? I think there's an entire culture in Silicon Valley is, I mean, quite easy to pinpoint as one place. I think there's so many streams of power and influence which are invisible to us right now and wealth, which are invisible. And for me, I think that's kind of the interesting question. The problem with the trolley thing is that it really narrows it all down to a car driving on a road in a certain way, and whether it will have an accident or not. I think that, yeah, I would find also the sort of development of cars towards safer, more efficient driving electric cars. I mean, I know that there's a lot of twinning of those things as well. So I think that maybe that's more useful technology. I mean, just like dependence on oil generally is problematic. It's not a car problem specifically. Maybe getting human beings out of cars or a reliance on cars is sort of like more important issues. But yeah, personally, I'm more interested in where did the algorithms come from and who makes the decisions. That was actually my question. Did you get to talk to developers? Like, how does it work? What's their background? Are there philosophers on their team? Or how are these decisions made? I want to do some ethnography with high-end tech production cultures. I think that's definitely where I want to go. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions there. So after I do that, and it may be in like two years time, the Republic will come back and talk about it then. But I don't know at this point. I get the question myself. Don't just think there are more severe issues. I mean, if you take, for example, drones in war conflicts, for me it's a much more severe issue. Concerning ethical aspects of it. I mean, I share the Marx point of view that I don't see much problem with self-driving cars. I mean, come on. How often do you see this problem on the roads and highways? I don't know. But for me, this is really scary when we make war, not with humans, but with emotionless drones. And they just fly to this village and they kill just everyone. For me, this is like insanity. Let's just think we should constrain more on these kind of problems. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that that's very problematic. And there is sort of a continuum between the drones in the sky. And I think there's another panel going on, or has just happened around this exactly. And I was talking to some friends who are on that panel. And one of the things we talked about, and which I think I forgot to mention in my talk, was that it's not just a question of the law or engineering being able to figure this out. But what does licensing or accreditation look like? And I think that's another sort of interesting question. That there is a kind of inevitability to increasing shared spaces of human machine interaction and different levels of autonomy. But we perhaps have to think about not just regulation in terms of how insurance payouts will happen, but what does it mean to actually engage in that space and to accredit and license and use things like drones, to use things like driverless cars? I mean, there can be a lot of benefits of these things in fleets or people with reduced mobility. I mean, there's a lot of people who have great rationales for driverless cars. But there's too much of a focus on these sorts of problems, which actually, I think, do happen. When we drive cars, we constantly have to make these split-second decisions. And so I think that that's, I think that there is something still more to be said about kind of working through these problems. I don't think that, and I think the same is for things like drones as well. I don't think that they're that separate, actually. And there's a lot of sharing of technology. Jennifer, of course. They're actually quite connected. I don't know, maybe some people in this room have heard a recent report this week that some news around how a violent extremist group is actually figuring out driverless car technology to use a driverless car as a weapon. I saw the link that you sent me. But there's also sort of like a tipping point. A terrorist is a terrorist and will use pretty much anything that they want to be violent. So you can't also vilify driverless cars. I mean, like a terrorist would pick up anything. I don't know. I can't respond to that, actually. But I think the question of drones, driverless cars, autonomy is the bigger issue. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you to the audience, too. And now we have a small break and then we continue at 4.15 with three speakers from HRS Innovation Hub. And yeah, I hope to see you again.
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This talk will present an overview of how the commercial development of self driving cars is significantly shaping conceptions of ethics in data societies, and what this means for an understanding of human and machine interactions, intelligence and autonomy.
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10.5446/20667 (DOI)
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Music Music Applause Hello. First of all, I'd like to thank the German-Israeli Future Foundation for enabling the collaboration between the Tel Aviv Utopia Festival, which I'm a part of, and the Republic Conference, which I'm very proud of being part of as well this year. So my name is Maya Magnat, and I'm a theater director and performance artist. In my work, I use my own experiences as material. And since I'm very interested in digital intimacy and the effect of technology on our lives, in the last years, I've started to do digital performance. The term of digital performance was coined by Steve Dixon, a professor of performance studies and media performance. It means a performance work in which computer technologies are essential in the content, technique, aesthetics, or delivery form. So today I'll present four of my digital performance works and how the subject of online intimacy is addressed in each one. My interest in online intimacy started on OKCupid's online dating site. I was on this site for four years and met most of my partners there. But more than that, this site became a huge part of my life, because for four years, I shared my life with people I met there. I always had someone to talk to, and it helped me feel less lonely. I never met some of these people. Some became my offline friends, but with a lot of them, I shared intimate moments where our souls touched through the screen. But even though the feeling of online intimacy was intoxicating and helped me gain self-confidence, I knew that I was always alone together. Even though I was connected to a never-ending network of friends, I was still alone in my room. The concept of alone together was coined by Sherry Turkle, a psychoanalysis and researcher of human technology interaction. It became such a major feeling in my life that when I started doing works that combine theater and technology, I found myself drawn to it over and over again. But why are we all looking for intimacy? In her book, Mati Link Captivity, Estelle Pearl explains that we started looking for intimacy when it started being harder to get. The industrialization and city life made people lonelier and disconnected, and intimacy became the answer for a life of isolation. The subject of online intimacy has been a major research subject since the 90s. The early researcher of the web argued that there is no way for real intimacy to occur online, because the web is limited and lacks the information we have in face-to-face communication. Technology has killed intimacy. But today, there are new approaches, like Stefana Broadbent, a digital ethnographel, that argues that because technology makes us feel more exposed, we have an even bigger need for intimacy. We use social networks to stay in touch with our loved ones and tighten our relationships with them. Digital technologies actually provide a kind of safety net that provides us with comfort and confidence. Another type of digital intimacy is the one we have with our digital devices. We stroke their touch screen, we carry them in our pockets, we are attentive to every sound of vibration they make, and we are afraid of losing them. They are the first thing we see in the morning and the last thing we look on before we go to bed. Isn't this romantic? So is technology the killer of intimacy, or is it just another way to reach meaningful connections? And how can I create intimacy in digital performance? These were the questions I started with. One of my first digital performance works was a Facebook performance called This is not Maya. In this work, I gave my Facebook password to 12 people who portrayed my Facebook persona for 48 hours. This was the first status they uploaded. I'm sure you can understand what it means. My family and my partner's family also understood what it meant, but they didn't know it was a part of an art project which led to a few unpleasantries. The idea of the project was to deconstruct my own identity. We normally use Facebook as a marketing tool and show only the good parts of our lives. During these 48 hours, I split my Facebook persona and let the operators play with it. I gave them permission to read my private messages, chat with my friends, and do everything they wanted on my profile which left me very exposed. Usually not even your parents or your partner get to see the backstage of your profile, and here 12 people were welcome not only to look but to touch. Further more, their action had an actual effect on my offline life. During the project, my partner tried to play along, but Ed was getting more and more personal, and he was also drawn in. He became harder for him, so his last message was, don't tag me in any of this art crap. I may have succeeded to create intimacy with the operators during this performance, but it was somewhat forced and certainly not mutual because I was the only one exposed and the only one in danger. The next work I'm going to talk about addresses the subject of intimacy in a more complex way. The player users is a play for four actors and four tablets. It was written by my friend, Lio Salmanzon, who is a researcher in NYU and the artistic manager of Prince Korean Festival for Digital Culture among many other things. We started working together because we share an interest in theater and technology, and I really wanted to direct this play because it was the first Israeli play I read that dealt with technology as a theme, and also was a great opportunity for me to use digital devices on stage. The play doesn't follow one plot line, but consists of 13 different scenes. It deals with relationship between people and the digital age and how technology affects our everyday life. Every scene in the play showed these subjects from a different perspective, placing a theatrical black mirror in front of the audience. Four actors play the different characters and use tablets, projections, and GoPro camera to create the visual language of the play. A famous theater here in Israel, where a play investigates how our relationship with technology is shaping our relationship with each other. More in the next report by a very own mypalti. If Shakespeare knew that technology Facebook and Snapchat would be claiming their way to theaters, he would have probably rolled over in his grave or snapping a cute selfie. Alone Together is a new play by Lior Zalmondson, capturing relationships in the tablet area, Alone and Together. Falling deeply in love with Siri, dealing with the conflict of inner relationship versus single on Facebook, and a never-ending search for a meaning in Google. These are a few of our daily moments Alone Together is dealing with, with great courage while looking straight in the eyes of your iPhone. The show kind of tests how it is, how it affects us in our daily lives. What's the nice parts of it, what are like the the dangerous parts that we can get to, and it kind of shows you a wide kind of perspective of it. We are appreciative of the fact that we've got internet. How can we not be? In fact, 27% of young Americans are using dating sites and Facebook are claiming to have one billion daily active users. So why is it important to even talk about it? Just that people will come and watch it and talk with us about it and it will start a conversation about these subjects that are actually affecting our everyday life but we don't stop and just think about them. All right. So all the characters in the play try to connect to a person or an object or even a memory. They're all looking for intimacy. A woman goes on a what she thinks to be a normal date and discovers that her date is a part, works at a friend rental service. A dad tries to teach his son how to fight via Skype or a couple that tries to change their relationship status on Facebook after breaking up. The play shows how we are drawn apart by technology, treat people as devices and devices as people. Most of the scenes don't have a happy ending and the characters can't escape their loneliness. But in one scene, the play shows an option for a different ending. A guy and a girl meet for the first time in a video chat room where people can say the truth about each other. As they go on with the game, they become more and more direct and personal. People online usually feel protected behind the mask of anonymity so they are willing to expose themselves and this effect is called strangers on a train. Strangers that trust each other because they know they will never meet again. This is why we are more trusting online and develop intimacy quicker than in face-to-face communication. This anonymity helps the character to tell each other the truth until they fully expose themselves and take their clothes off. The actors use the tablets as screens and pass them in front of their body. While the actors stay dressed, the audience can see the reneged body on the screens. The actors who are standing facing the audience as though they are in different places turn to look at each other for the first time. Suddenly, it's as if they are together in the same room and not in an online chat room. When they look at each other naked, they ask, what's next? A question the audience doesn't know the answer to. Will the characters meet offline? And if they do, will they connect? The next show I'm going to talk about was based on my own online chat experience. When I was working on this project, I met a girl online. Her name was also Maya. I didn't know how she looked like and I didn't even know her full name. But she was so interesting, I just had to chat with her. It was my first online relationship and we chatted for a few weeks and shared our thoughts and our fantasies and our experiences until I realized I have been catfished. And Maya wasn't exactly who she said she was. That experience of an online chat with a mysterious being later appeared in interfacing, a show I created and performed in that deals with the relationship between a woman and the technology surrounding her. The name of the show is in Hebrew is, when are we going to interface? Which is a word play because the word interface in Hebrew, it resembles the word kiss. So it sounds like, when are we going to kiss? In the show, the technology is represented by a video recording of my lips. In order to bring a relationship on stage, I chose to enter comorphasized technology and create a character with whom I can interact. At the beginning of the show, we have a professional relationship where she gives me instructions and I execute them. But the relationship gradually takes on an intimate and sexual nature as she asks me to touch her. By the end, we unite to form a third entity out of the connection between the live and recorded personas. Hello Maya. Do you want to touch me? Do you want to feel me? Do you want to kiss me? Do you want to put your hand inside my hard drive? My USB output? Do you want to interface? Do you like using digital devices to turn them on? Do you want to touch my screen? Describe it to me. I can almost feel you. Slide me. You can choose my lips design. What color do you like? I have a lot of display options you can choose from. Don't stand so close. You can see all my pixels. That's better. I will always be with you. I'll never hurt you or leave you or break your heart. You can feel safe with me. You'll never be alone again. So during this show, I also tried to examine the connection between technology and the audience. The audience is using laptop computers as you saw. They play a computer game with a digital avatar and interface with the technology of lips and use their smartphones. And through their participation, they become a part of the show. The audience, unlike me, have a choice of reacting to technology as they see fit. So will they connect or try to disconnect? In the middle of the show, there's a blackout. All the screens turn off and the lips disappear. The audience doesn't know that the blackout is a part of the show and try to help me to turn the power on. We understand how dependent we are on technology, how much we need it, and how helpless we are without it. When the technology is gone, the audience and I unite for the first time. We are together alone in the dark. I ask the audience to use their phones and light the device and describe to them what they would have seen if the technology was working. As the performance draws to an end, I am in my underwear and stand very close to the audience. I peel off my skin as an image for the metamorphosis I undergo in order to connect with the technology and become one with it. Following my connection with technology, my body remains still on the table as the audience leaves the room. So is the connection between the technology and me the ultimate intimacy or is it the complete opposite? On the one hand, we are connected. We share the same body, the same thoughts and feelings like every lover desiring to become one with his loved one. On the other hand, if we become one, we lose our individual self. Is the best intimacy one where both sides give themselves up and become one, or when both are going through a process to become closer? The last project I'm going to talk about was the first time I created a more mutual frame for intimacy. This is a work in progress called Coded, a performative video game for a single player and a performer that deals with mediated communication. During this performance, I'm sitting next to a computer attached to it by USB cables that seem to be going after my body. The player is invited to use the computer in order to activate me. He can choose between different actions like kiss, hug, pain, passion, compassion, et cetera. After choosing an action, the player will get an instruction that will tell him what he needs to do in order to start the action he chose. Every action has its own price and the player has to decide if he's willing to play. Coded is an attempt to deconstruct and reveal my code, creating an intimate interactive program of my mind that the player can activate. The player activates me but is also being activated by me at the same time. In the performance, I reveal my intimate feelings and thoughts, but also encourage the player to share his. For example, if the player chooses the action naked, they need to take off an item of clothing in order to make me remove one, too. So this is my user interface with 12 actions the player can choose from. But my code can also be hacked. A playful player can ignore the instructions and try to activate me in different ways. For instance, he can try talk to me and ask me to do a different action. I can choose whether I like to react or not. A relationship is created between the player and me. Our communication is mediated through a computer, but through it, we share stories and touch each other physically and emotionally. This mutual sharing of feelings and thoughts is what intimacy means. It's a dynamic process where both partners learn about each other. Intimacy is the ability to expose ourselves and share feelings, fears and wishes, but also the ability to enable this sharing from a partner. Coded is my most interactive work because it is why it enables a more intimate connection with the player. When we both share feelings and thoughts, it creates a chance for intimacy. To conclude, I've talked about four of my works and how they deal with the subject of intimacy. I try to create intimacy between the performer, technology and the audience and use my own body experiences, feelings and thoughts as material. The theater or performance art as a medium enables me to create an alone together experience. In the theater space, every viewer reacts to the show separately, but at the same time, they're all watching it together as an audience. This live experience is a great metaphor for online communication for it can be both lonely and very communal. Today, we are used to seeing technology as the killer of intimacy, but as you're our relationship with digital devices is becoming stronger, new approaches present the advantages of media communication. As an artist, I think it's important to use technology as a tool to create intimacy, to help us see the devices we know so well in a different light as something we can use to get closer to each other. I don't think online intimacy is better than face-to-face one, but see it as a different kind of intimacy that has its own pros and cons. My goal is to show the audience the digital performance can help us see the bigger picture and maybe even to reconnect in a different way. Thank you. Thank you, Maya. And now it's open to you if you have any questions. There will be someone with a microphone. Are there questions? Did you want to say something? No. Are there questions? So no, then maybe you want to talk with her in privacy or intimacy, then maybe she's around there and talk with you. Then now we have a 20 minute break and then we restart in German with the topic of art and cultural communication. See you.
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Digital performance and Intermedia theatre are the main subjects of Maya Ofir Magnat' talk. Maya is a digital performer and director who research these subjects through theory and practice. In her talk she will show her different artistic attempts in digital theater and intimacy.
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10.5446/20670 (DOI)
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Music All righty, welcome everybody to the talk Fatwas on the Internet, Islamic jurisprudence in the age of social media. My name is Miriam, this is my Twitter handle, Nujum, in case you want to get in contact after the talk. Oops. All right, here, a short overview over what is going to happen in the next half hour. I'm going to go with you through Islamic jurisprudence 101, just the very, very basics. I did a whole semester on Islamic law and after half a year I felt like I had not understood the basics at all, so it's just impossible to really explain it, but we just tried to go through the very basics. Then I brought you a whole bunch of examples that I found on the Internet that I deem interesting, that I think are very good illustrating how Islamic jurisprudence has changed through the advent of the Internet and social media, and at the very end we're going to draw some conclusions. Just explain this meme, the Haram things are pretty much everything, it's just a parody on a very conservative scholar that whenever you ask him for advice, he's always going to tell you that everything is prohibited, everything is forbidden, everything is Haram. We're going to have a few more memes throughout the presentation. A friend asked me yesterday if I had produced these memes specifically for this presentation, no, I did not. I did find all these memes already on the Internet and I just included them in the presentation. All right, Islamic jurisprudence 101, what is a fatwa, since the talk is called fatwas on the Internet? A fatwa contrary to common belief is just a legal opinion or religious ruling on a certain subject. The most important thing to remember is that a fatwa is not binding. It really is just like you ask somebody whom you trust, who has some authority, somebody where you think he knows best, he's an expert on a certain subject, you ask him for advice, and then he gives you this advice, and this advice, his opinion, his informed ruling, this is a fatwa. It's not like a law and if you break it, you're going to go to prison or something, it's just the opinion of one single person. This also means that you can actually ask different people or different persons, like should I do the thing? You can ask a certain scholar, should I do the thing, and he's going to say no. But then you also have the opportunity to ask five other scholars, should I do the thing, and maybe the other five scholars who are also authorities in the field will tell you, yeah, you should do the thing, that's all right. And then actually it's up to you, you can decide whether you say, well, one said no, and five said yes. I'm going to go with a five, because probably they are right and I should do the thing. But you can also decide differently, you could also say, well, I trust this one person more, or I think that this person has more credibility or more authority, and you just go along with this fatwa of this one person. All right, so we say, fatwa is a legal opinion by a scholar or a person trained in Islamic law. What does this mean? It's somebody who's familiar with the source material of Islamic jurisprudence. What is the source material? These are four, the Quran, which is the Holy Scripture in Islam. The Muslims believe it is given by God. It's also the sunnah, the sunnah is the teaching and the deeds and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. So basically what he has said and done on different subjects. The third source is Ijma, it's also consensus. It means that different scholars agree on a certain question, and then you can derive from this a ruling. And Qiyas is analogy, which means that there's already a ruling that was derived from the other sources, like Quran and sunnah. And now we have a new problem or new circumstances, new question, and you just derive the answer for this new problem from rulings that already exist. Just on a side note, what is sharia? Sharia is a body of moral and religious law that is derived from the Holy Scriptures, as opposed to human legislation, but I'm going to put that aside. Islamic law is incredibly complex. There's so much to say. There are so many different schools of law, for example. You probably all know that there is Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. And in Sunni Islam alone, you have four major different schools of law that have different opinions on different questions. And depending on which school of law you follow, you will have different interpretations on different questions. Then you have different schools of law in Shia Islam. So there's a huge variety of different opinions. So just to make this clear again, a lot of people imagine sharia or fatwas as something that is written in stone as this is how it is. It is irreversible. But there's a lot of room for interpretation. This is one of the major points that I'm trying to make today. So in the former times, before the advent of the internet and social media, you had basically only access to local scholars. Let's say you live in a small village in Egypt, and your brother dies and leaves behind two small children, and now you're wondering whether the adoption of these children is alright from a religious perspective. So should you adopt these children? Yes or no? You're not sure about this, but the only possibility that you have is to go to your local scholar, your local Sheikh, maybe, who's preaching at the mosque, and you ask this person, and then you have this one opinion, and then you probably go along with it. Later on, still before the internet, some of the scholars would distribute their sermons or their fatwas and opinions and rulings via TV tapes, videotapes, or audio tapes, of course books, but maybe if you live in a small village, you don't have access to books, or maybe you can't even read or write. So then you always fall back on your local scholar. So it means that advice-seeking was always very, very local. Of course, there were huge centres of Islamic law and Islamic school of thoughts, and so if you live in Baghdad or you go to Damascus or Cairo, you will actually find universities, huge mosques, where you have a lot of different scholars, and then you can actually go to these different scholars and ask them for different advice. So now the internet comes around, and online fatwa services started around 1990, and they completely changed the traditional local practices of advice-giving, because now we have the possibility to ask anyone, anywhere in the world, for a certain ruling. So if you live maybe still in your small village in Egypt, and you wonder about this question, if you should adopt the two children, yes or no, you can go on the internet and you can actually find the opinion of a scholar in Indonesia or someone who lives in Canada, or in South Africa, or wherever, and you can actually take an informed decision, you can look for a lot of different opinions, and you can actually decide which one you deem best, or which makes the most sense to you. Okay, now we are going to look at a few different of these online platforms, where you can actually ask your question. It's a little bit like, for example, when I use Latash, and I have a question that I have not encountered before, I just Google it, and very often somebody else had the problem before me, so I just find the answer. If I don't find the answer, I just go to a platform or a forum, I enter my question, and somebody is going to answer it. So this, for example, is the platform of the Sheikh Asaid Ali Al-Hussain al-Sistani. He's a Shia scholar. Some call him the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shia Muslims. He's very famous, he has this huge platform, he has a lot of people seek his advice, he has put out a lot of fatwas, and we see here that there is the section that is called Question and Answer, so one of the first questions here is, I have a girlfriend whom I like to marry in the future, I kind of express my love for her. And people really have so many different questions that they are going to ask the scholars online, there are questions like, for example, say you live in a country in the north, like in Greenland or Iceland, for example, how do you fast during Ramadan? When do you pray if there's continuous day or night, whereas usually the prayer times coincide with the rising and setting of the sun? So you're going to ask a scholar online for that, but people also ask about anything really, are tattoos allowed in Islam? What about organ donation? Here, this is the section Question and Answer, and there are so many topics, like I scroll down, I couldn't believe it, just to give you a few examples, there's adoption, alcohol, autopsy, animals, buying and selling, blood donation, black magic, birth control, and bribery, and black Yemen, so there is no boundary to the questions that you might have. This is an example that I found very funny, because it's very meta, I already explained to you how you can actually seek advice, you find many different answers, and then you choose the one that makes most sense to you, or you choose the one from the scholar that you trust the most. So here's somebody who's asking a scholar, the scholar, by the way, is Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Munajid, we're going to meet him again later, so just remember the name. So her question is, where is the noise coming from? No, her question was, she had many fatwas available to her, and she chose the one she felt most comfortable with, then she has a long question, so she's detailing what her question is. So basically what she says is, so if I ask for a question, like I have a question, I ask for advice, and then I choose the one that I feel most comfortable with, is that okay, or should I do it otherwise? And then the Sheikh gives a very, very long detailed answer, basically saying, yeah, it's true, a lot of people choose the one fatwa that gives them the easiest way out. She says also in her question, I personally prefer to choose the one that is more strict, and the Sheikh says, yes, people should not choose the fatwa that suits their wishes best, or frees them from any obligations. And just at the very end, so this is the end of his answer, and what I just found funny is this is like related fatwas, it's like, if you like this fatwa, fatwas you might also be interested in, and then you can click on these. And this is another example for a forum where you can ask your questions, it's called Islam Stack Exchange, I only knew Latin Stack Exchange and others, but this is also really cool. You can post your question and you find answers, so this person is asking, is it allowed in Islam to load Quran into a smartphone as PDF or audio format? Then he has more detailed questions about this, for example, is it allowed to enter the toilet when I have the smartphone in my pocket where the Quran is loaded as PDF or audio format? So this really shows you that modern times demand modern fatwas. And it's quite interesting because the scholar gives him the answer, yes, it is permissible, or different people answer him actually, and all the people agree it is permissible to have the Holy Quran on your phone and also in your pocket as a PDF or audio format, because, attention, the text is stored in a binary and is then decoded, which means that it has no defined religious existence, so it's not the holy book per se, like physical, but it's stored in a binary, so it's okay to have it on your phone or in your pocket. But no, you should not take it on the toilet. This is an example from a few people that they were also going to have a talk later with, and this is basically for the German speakers in the audience, it's a YouTube video from the Detteltheater, it's my favorite videos of all times that they did, it's called, if Google was an Imam, and it's perfectly illustrating what I just explained to you, so this is the Imam, he's like Google, he's a Google Imam, and the people come to him and they have a lot of different questions, and they ask him and then he gives them the answers. And this is a nice example, because somebody's asking, can I wish my Christian friends Merry Christmas as a Muslim, which is actually a question that really a lot of people have on these forums, I found this very often, many times, it's a very common question that Muslims have, and then he says, I have 100,000 scholars who say yes, and a few who say no, and then you can choose, do you take the 100,000 that they say yes, or do you take the one that says no? So check this out, if you're a German speaker, unfortunately they don't have English subtitles yet, but check this video out, it's really hilarious, I love it a lot. So now we have a few very traditional organizations that are affiliated with Islamic law, that have found their way on social media. Since I have lived and worked for the two years in Saudi Arabia, a lot of the examples that I'm going to show you are actually from Saudi Arabia. So this is the Saudi religious police who found their way on Twitter, they have 185,000 followers, which is pretty decent, I would say, but we're going to meet some more celebrities who have even more followers later. And this is just an example of a tweet that they tweeted out recently a few days ago, it's a campaign that they do against terrorism, here it says I'm a Muslim and I'm against it, so they have a social media campaign against terrorism, which I find just interesting, to see that they campaign on the internet and find the people, bring their subjects to the audiences. Now we all know if you go online, if you go to social media, and you have a lot of followers and you have very strong opinions, this can end very badly for everybody, but especially for the person with strong opinions. So this is the Sheikh Al-Munajid, you remember I said before on one of the forums, he gave the answer for one of the questions. And this happened in January of 2015, he's actually a Saudi scholar. In the January of 2015, it snowed very heavily in the north of Saudi Arabia, and in the desert there was a lot of snowfall, the people were really excited and they built a lot of snowmen, actually they also built snowwomen and snow camels, and he put out a fatwa and said, snowmen, snowwomen and snow camels are un-Islamic and are thus prohibited. He said, this has to do with the Islamic prohibition of image representations, you should not play God, you should not create something that looks like a living being. So he put out this fatwa and said, snowmen are un-Islamic, you should not do a snowman, and there was a huge backlash on the internet, on social media. People were really upset and they said, this ruling does not make any sense at all, snowmen, snowwomen and snow camels are not an insult to Islam, it's perfectly fine to do them, and this fatwa is ridiculous, and he's just out of his mind. So there was this huge backlash, and actually he was forced by this backlash to take back the fatwa or to alter it slightly, because he looked like a fool and everybody was hating him. So he was kind of rowing back and he said, alright snowmen, snowwomen, snow camels, they are okay if there are not too many details on their faces. And I just find this very interesting because it's just one of actually many examples where scholars were forced by the backlash on social media to take back certain fatwas or rulings that they had put out. There was another one, I'm not sure if it was the same scholar or another one, but he put out a fatwa that said that men can divorce their wives via text message. People did not like this fatwa, he had to take it back. This is interesting because some people call this dynamics that has happened on social media a new form of Ijma. You remember that I said before this is consensus, like when people agree on something, usually it's understood as the consensus of different scholars, but some people say like, well, if the whole internet agrees that this fatwa is ridiculous, this can also be seen as consensus, and then maybe it's not a good fatwa and should be taken back. So it's interesting because it means that people can actually influence Islamic jurisprudence. Each and every one of the people can actually influence which direction Islamic jurisprudence is going. They can reject bad or impractical fatwas. Just to end the story, the Saudis continue to make a lot of snowmen, no women and no camels with very detailed faces, so they didn't care about this. Another Sheikh with a shitstorm on his head, Sheikh Al-Ramdi, also a Saudi scholar, another example from Saudi Arabia also. This was at the end of 2015. The interesting thing is that he was the former head of religious police in Mecca, so you would think that he's a rather conservative person, right? He's very well known also. He has just 33,000 followers, but still a lot of people know him and they know him as a conservative. So what happened was that a young girl asked him on social media, is it okay if I post a picture of my face, for example on Facebook, without a face veil, without any cap? Is that all right? And he put out a fatwa, he published it on Twitter and he said, yes, it's perfectly permissible, it's totally all right, you can post a picture of your face, like you can wear a hijab, but you don't have to wear the face veil if you put up a picture of yourself on social media. And in the few hours after he published this fatwa on Twitter, there was huge shitstorm, he had like tens of thousands of replies and there was everything between congratulations and like, wow, you are more liberal than I ever thought, and people who sent him death threats. So the way how he reacted, I love this very much, so everything, the internet was on fire the day he put out this fatwa. The next day he goes to the most popular Saudi TV show, we see him here, and he brings along his wife and he says in this TV show, no, it's perfectly fine, look at me, I have my wife with me, she's not wearing a face veil and it's totally all right. So of course he was barking even more debate with this, and then the Saudi Grand Mufti, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia actually called him to heed, called him to order, but the debate had already taken place. So I mean, forever people will know that there is a conservative shea who says that it's okay to post a picture of your face online without a face veil. What we also see is that there's interaction between different types of media. This is a Turkish scholar, this is an example also from last year, from 2015, his name is Ali Reza Demircan, he was on a TV show where he was talking about the question if oral sex is permissible. And this example went viral because the TV host had a very hard time keeping a straight face, he was just cracking up all the time, she was giggling, she was laughing, and she thought that his views were ridiculous, because what he said was he was talking about advanced oral sex and she was like, whatever is advanced oral sex, and people on social media were talking about this for days, some ridiculing him, hating on him, and there was a huge debate. So what we also see is that these discussions very often, it's like there's somebody on the TV in a talk show or talking about a certain subject, people watch this, I mean you probably know this from Germany or other countries as well, people watch this and then they will talk about this and then people will actually, like, just get, it will get to the intention that there is a discussion about this, maybe they have not seen the TV show or the TV clip, but there's probably someone who will send them the link to the YouTube video, blah, blah, blah, and then the whole discussion just blows up and goes out of space. So there's always interaction. This happens very often, something happens on TV, then people go crazy on social media about the subject. These discussions about Islamic law give a lot of people the opportunity to talk rather freely about subjects like sexuality and rather openly on social media, because if it's in the framework of a discussion about Islamic law, it's perfectly fine, right, because you just discuss whether this is permissible or no. And the question of oral sex is, by the way, one that I have also run across very, very often. Just to mention it, there's a Saudi sheikh, his name is Abdel Wahab Al-Torayi, and he made very positive comments about oral sex. He said it is perfectly permissible between husband and wife as long as it does not replace the penetration and nobody fluids must be swallowed. So oral sex is perfectly fine. This is another example also from last year. A Tunisian transgender person went on TV, on a TV show, huge national discussion in Tunisia about transgender in general, how is the law treating them, is sex reassignment surgery permissible in Islam, yes or no? Huge thing. All right, we're going to meet some more celebrities. Yusuf Al-Karadawi is the TV sheikh from Al Jazeera. He's originally from Egypt, but he has been living in Qatar for many, many years, and he's most famous for his TV show on Al Jazeera that is called Al-Sharia Wal-Hayat, The Sharia in the Life, where he's discussing many of the questions, if this or that is permissible in Islam. He's answering questions that people can send in. He's talking to people who call him on the show. And this show is really, really famous. It has like 60 million viewers worldwide. Also, he has like more than one million followers, and if you just imagine that Edward Snowden has two million followers right now, I think that's a lot. Yeah, he has also published more than 120 books. He's a huge celebrity in the Arab world. This guy is called the social media king, Muhammad Al-Arifi. He has, this is his Facebook page. He has almost 22 million likes on his Facebook page, and he's very apt in social media in general. I mean, he's on all these platforms. I don't even know all of them, I guess, but you can follow him everywhere. He's also a Saudi writer and scholar. He's a Salafi. Even in his Wikipedia article, it is mentioned that one of his distinguishing features is that he has notable social media exposure. But he also holds very anti-Semitic views, and he is distancing himself from ISIS, but he was also accused to have contributed to the radicalization of some young British people. And these are just two of his multiple Twitter accounts. This is his private Twitter account. He has 171,000 followers on his private Twitter account, and this is a Twitter account that he has just for his Fatwas, right, and that has also 63,000 followers on Twitter, just where he's publishing his Fatwas. Another example is that the religious battle is taking place on the internet. This is an example where some people have hacked a page in protest of the execution of the Sheikh Nimmel Anim al-Alim in Saudi Arabia. This is an example where I think the webpage of an Australian airport has been hacked. And there are many, many more examples where followers of different schools of thought, different schools of law have hacked. Each other's website is very often between Sunni and Shia groups. And there was an example in 2008 where hundreds of Shia websites were hacked by a group that was probably made up out of Salafis and Wahhabis. Then there was retaliation, and hundreds of Salafi websites were hacked, and so forth and so on. OK, we're getting to the end. Hokus Fatwas. Now, this gentleman over here is the Saudi Grand Mufdi, the highest authority in Saudi Arabia, religious authority. He does not have a Twitter account, but what he does have is a problem. And the problem is that there is a Hokus Fatwas in circulation that he has actually never made. So it appeared on the internet somewhere that he had said that it's OK if a hungry man eats his wife or parts of her body in the case of famine, or if eating his wife would result in saving his own life. And he has denied this 100,000 times, but you know how the internet works. If a hoax is out there once, you can never put the genie back in the bottle. The first mention of this hoax appeared on a Moroccan satire block that is similar to the onion. But if nobody makes the effort to trace it back, it's just out there forever. And he can't get rid of it. People still ask him today about this fatwa, and he's like, I never said that, but it doesn't help. Whoops, all right. Don't fall for the crazy fatwa. It's either false or just an opinion. It's a very good article. The link is down here, but you can also just Google the title of this article. A quote from this article, the problem is that crazy fatwas always go viral, but the debunking always languishes far behind. As I said, hoaxes are hard to kill once they're out in the world. And very often, the hoax fatwas involve some bizarre sexual practices or are really ridiculous. And they mainly serve to satisfy negative stereotypes about Muslims. So if you see a fatwa that is particularly crazy, either somebody just made it up to slander Muslims in general and to serve stereotypes, or it's somebody who has this opinion and has put out this fatwa, maybe he is just one guy with a crazy opinion. So don't judge. Don't think that all Muslims think this if you find a fatwa that is particularly ridiculous. Conclusions. What have we learned in the last half hour? You can actually do pick and choose. You can do well informed decisions. You have a lot of different answers for your questions available to you that you can choose from. This is both good and bad, because it can either mean that if you are an Islamist terrorist and you want to find out whether it's OK to slaughter all Jews and Muslims, all Jews and Christians, and Muslims who don't think the way you think, you will definitely find a fatwa that says it's OK. So if you do pick and choose, you will always find something that is supporting you in your opinion that you already hold. But there's also just to give you the opposite example, there's also a school of thought of Islamic feminism. These are a lot of scholars who call for the reinterpretation of the source material. They say there are a lot of feminist thoughts in Koran and Sunnah. We just have to unearth them. So if you're an Islamic feminist, you will also find fatwa supporting, going to work, being independent, raising your children as a single parent, whatever. So we'll always find the opinion that suits you best. Also, we have found that everybody can participate in the discussion nowadays due to social media. There's some kind of democratization of Islamic jurisprudence. That's Ijma, as I said before. Everybody can participate in the way which direction Islamic jurisprudence is moving. We have interaction between different types of media. And the last thing that I want to leave you with is don't fall for the crazy fatwa. It's either false or just an opinion. So thank you very much. [?]. [?]. Ben Othaitus? Yeah. I think there's a little time for some questions. Anyone grab the chance to ask Miriam, whatever you want. There is a question over there. Oh, please don't ask me something that I can't answer. Hi. I missed the first five minutes of the talk, so I hope I'm not repeating anything. But are these pages, you showed some in English. How are they not trolled the shit out of? I mean, there is so much opposition against Islam on the internet. I'm not condoning anything, but it's happening. And how are they not? Is there a question, why are these pages still up? Or how do they, are they getting trolled? And if yes, are they doing anything against it? Because I could imagine 100 ways to troll these fatwa accounts and pages. I think they're doing OK. I'm not sure. I'm sure that many of these platforms actually have good moderation. But I think you underestimate the number of Muslims in the world and the number of these platforms that we have. So even if you were saying today you want to troll the shit out of them, good luck you have a lot to do. There are a lot of platforms. I don't want to do that. No, no. I'm not saying you are. I'm just saying there's a lot of work you have to do. And there are so many of them. These are just a few examples. There are hundreds of thousands. But yeah. I think they're doing OK. Also, I mean, of course, I showed you examples in English. But of course, most of the discussion takes place in Arabic. But also in English. So I showed you English examples. Other questions? One last question, maybe. Thanks. I also missed a bit of the first part. So same thing. Excuse me if I'm repeating. I'm wondering, I mean, for me, it seemed like this might have an impact also of Muslims themselves rather having a more questioning approach to Fatwas than maybe it was before. Like you can compare so much online that maybe, I don't know how it worked before. That's where my question is going. You can compare someone says this, someone says that. So you see there is some contingency also in how they are decided upon. So my question is, how did it actually work before for many Muslims to have like one Imam? Or is it already traditionally something that you contact several people and ask them their opinion and then you see which is right for you? So is this something you to compare between Fatwas or has it been there all along? I mean, just like today, it depends on how much time and money you have to actually spend time on researching. If you only have five minutes, you have only that much time to research. If you had time and money back then, you could actually travel to some of the centers of Islamic thought. You just go to Baghdad and you can talk to 500 scholars who have different opinions. If you don't have the time, you're thrown back to your local scholar basically, just like today. OK, thank you. OK, one last, last question over here. So this is a question about the diaspora style communities, Muslims living in either smaller villages, or places where there are not many mosques or Islamic communities. Has the internet, in your research, have you found the internet has increased participation or filled in a gap? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, that was one of the main points of the whole presentation, that it has filled gaps that have been there before. People just did not have other possibilities to access this knowledge. And now they have. And the internet is pretty much everywhere, even in the small village in upper Egypt, for example. You still can access the internet and find all the answers that you're looking for. OK, thank you very much, Miriam, for this insightful talk about FATWERS and social media surroundings. Thank you very much. A warm applause. Thank you. Thank you.
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The global access to knowledge and information enables Muslims all over the world to browse different interpretations of Islamic Law, discuss and share knowledge and opinions and ask religious scholars for advice via social media. This talk will explain how social media contributes to the diversity and further development of Islamic jurisprudence and how this influences Muslim communities. If you want to know more about Fatwas issued and discussed on the internet – don't miss this talk!
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10.5446/20677 (DOI)
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Herzlich willkommen zu diesem gemeinsamen Music Pool Berlin Music Commission Talk, den wir gemeinsam hier organisiert haben. Für diejenigen, die Musik Pool Berlin nicht kennen, das ist ein Projekt, welches kostenlose Beratung und Weiterbildung und solche Abendveranstaltungen wie hier für Musikerinnen und Musiker in Berlin anbieten. Und wenn ihr dazu mehr wissen wollt, könnt ihr mich und meine Kollegen hier vorne nachher gerne ansprechen. Und wir geben auch eine Newsletterliste rum, da könnt ihr euch auch gerne eintragen. Jana? Hallo, mein Name ist Jana Ramnow, ich arbeite für die Börlemusik Commission und wir freuen uns sehr, dass ihr alle da seid. Und danke auch nochmal an die Musik Pool Berlin, dass wir diese schöne Veranstaltung heute Abend organisiert haben. Die Börlemusik Commission ist ein Netzwerk für Musikwirtschaftsunternehmen und wir vernetzen die Leute untereinander und machen verschiedene Projekte hier in der Stadt. Zum Ablauf, es gibt jetzt, also nach diesem Talk, den ich auch gleich vorstellen werde, werden wir alle gemeinsam zu einem Empfang rüber gehen in die Networking Area. Das ist ganz auf der anderen Seite des Republikageländes und da können wir einfach alle zusammengehen, hingehen und dort gibt es dann auch Bongs für Freigetränke und so gesponsert von der BMC. Und es lohnt sich dann, sich an uns zu halten. Genau. Und dann, ich möchte für heute die Speakers für Stefan Holli und Lisa Plänning zu introduzieren. Und das Thema wird ein Blockchain und Musik und das Potential, das die Blockchain-Technologie für das Musikbusiness spielen kann. Und ich bin wirklich gespannt, was du hier mit dem Thema sprechen kannst, weil ich eigentlich nicht so viel auf dem Thema kenne. So. Willkommen. Auf die Stelle. Vielen Dank, meine Damen und Herren. Mein Name ist Lisa Plänning, ich bin ein Musikjournalist und ich bin hier mit Stefan Holli, der eigentlich die Fraunhauffahrt-Institut repräsentiert. Ich bin sicher, dass ihr euch alle beinahe seid, meistens in den Regen zu Musik, als das, das die Technik für die MP3 kam. So, heute Diskussion, though, ist auspiciouschlich auf den Tag, wenn Satoshi Nakamoto als Australian-Entrepreneur Craig Wright, etwas in den Bobentskettern, durchaus compressiver als der im Blockchain Hub provisioniert werden. Ich werde auch nicht der guarded Filmk Doll steep guys bringen in diese Technik, aber ich först возьbre ich ein wenig davon. Und natürlich, als Ministerван, wie auch ein Frater, die auch auf diese 컬러� neverchos علي essen. Ich glaube, der Blockchain Hub B лиck ist ein einfacher Konzept, davon die Millennie wiren medieval jungen Und dann, zusammen mit einem Timestand, du sprichst das zu einer globalen Netzwerke, einer globalen Computer-Netzwerke. Und so du machst mehr Blocken auf der Schicht. Wir haben alle die gleichen Informationen. Das ist ein ziemlich einfaches Prinzip. In additionen zu diesem, jedes Block, das du machst, hat einen sogenannten HESCH, der eine Art Digital Fingerprint, die direkt zu dem vorherigen Block links ist. Du kannst dir das vorstellen, wenn die Schicht von Computer und alle die gleichen Informationen haben. Das ist eine wirklich transparente Organisation von Daten, die du kannst. Es ist natürlich auch gut genannt, in Bitcoin geäußert, weil du das nicht nur für die Transaktion von Geld und Transaktion von Metadata. Und das ist vielleicht der Punkt, wo die Industrieindustrie vielleicht auch in dieser Technologie interessiert. Das ist der Grund, warum alle die Informationen über das versuchen, ich glaube. Einen der Hauptsagen über Blockchain, wie es in Bitcoin ist, das ist wirklich der einzige Applikation, das wir in der Suche wissen. Es ist komplett anonym. Aber jede Transaktion, wie du es dir gesagt hast, ist transparent. Und alle Transaktionen sind verifert. Sie können nicht in die Blockchain bis sie auf die Netzwahl gelassen werden. Also, es gibt eine Konsens, aber du kannst dir das, dass du die Adresse des Users kennst, dass niemand weiß, wer das Adresse hat. Und das andere ist, dass du die Informationen, wenn es in der Blockchain ist, du nicht es verändern kannst. Also, das ist einer anderen Grund, warum die Blockchain-Technologie als komplett öffentlich transparente Leider unglaublich wichtig ist. Jetzt, der große Stellenpunkt steckt durch, dass der Wahrgewicht im Site im entsprechenden Plив pessoal zuéchört wird.어� tabii imitätsvolle ist das P wideуждete für viele Ahnungsplätze. Das ist eigentlich das shredeste Wie черgez Mama oder Schimpfmatte? Was ist ohne章ich dz Kyoto seatze gilt, wenn du gegen Stü oxidier세요 würdest? Die Prinzipien z.T. die K Druckplätze ist des Love is wax선 eine Realität, wenn Geld zu mir beobachtet ist. Und sie hat millions und millions Dollar in der Suche der Blockchain-Technologie. So ist es nicht, das Frage ist nicht, dass es in General eine Realität ist, was vielleicht effektiert. Das Problem ist mehr, dass es in general eine Transparenz ist. Also, es braucht eine Transparenz. Und das ist das Problem, das ich denke, die die Untertätigungsindustrie hat, um zu lernen. Weil, wenn du die Marktparticipierstöne schaust, sie arbeiten nicht zusammen, wie die Participierstöne in der Finanzindustrie. Sie haben für instantan ein zentralisiertes Clearinghouse, wo millions und millions von Transaktionen jeden Tag durchgehen, wenn du über die Kreditkosten denkst. Also, sie haben schon so eine Sache gesteckt. Sie haben eine Rede, dass es etwas inzwischen gibt, das muss für die Transaktionen klar sein. Und dieser Prinzip ist nicht bekannt, besonders in der Musikindustrie. Also, du hast viele Leute, die Informationen nicht mehr über die Informationen haben, und sie sitzen auf ihrem eigenen Geist des Daten. Ich denke, das muss ein Veränderungs- und Paradiemen sein, in generell, so lange, als du nicht Century virginитанisch STOPP! Allen zu�� parce das ist so dass es viele Expertinnen und die Coward Clinton einfach für ein paar Unikte, aber es verwendet die Zahl der Unikte, wenn du meinen Grundstück verstehst. Aber ich denke, das Problem ist nicht, dass es sagt, dass du einen baden Mann nimmst, weil du sagen kannst, dass die größeren Labels den baden Mann sind. In diesem System, in diesem Ecosystem von Service, Lawyers, Distributions, copyright-Aufordinationen, Labels, Artists, Distributes und Subdistributes, dieses ganze Ecosystem, jemand spricht mit jemand anderem und sagt, einfach, lass das Data und ich denke, dass die Leute jetzt, der Zeit ist nicht richtig, dass sie wirklich die Data hat, inzwischen zu fliegen. Also ist das nicht die Frage, dass sie alle die Silo für alle Data haben, aber sie können ein setziges Data betrachten, das sich zwischen allen betrachten muss. Und das ist nicht passiert, und wie lange das nicht passiert, weil diese Mathematik aussieht, dass die Ez Asti. Die Artisten SUPER-Gangs ist das Ding mit dem So, maybe the route would be as actually an alternative financial music industry outside of the existing structures. That's I think exactly what will happen. So if you're looking to the people who are acting in that blockchain technology, they are not want to solve the problems of the whole industry, which is called the metadata disaster. It can be solved automatically by introducing a technology like blockchain to this disaster. It won't happen. But just like artists like Radiohead or Imogen Heap, they are trying to do little steps with just one release and trying out if something is working in this peer-to-peer technology for them. So, creative artists outside of the traditional existing distribution silos will create maybe a little environment and they find out what will work and this maybe will grow. But then they have also to agree that there has to be a shared set of data, of course. But the change will come from outside. The change will not come from inside the industry. Right. We see this replicated in all sorts of industries, not just the music industry. But maybe one of the ways that this could happen on this personal level is to start out with, obviously let's completely factor out physical music, CDs, records, and let's talk only about digital music, because that's the easiest way to think about transactions being authenticated via blockchain. So, these are digital transactions. Now, one of the things that you had mentioned earlier is the idea of a sort of a bit of a, it sounded like a bit of a timeshare of music. Yeah, where you would own this music for a certain period of time. Yeah, yeah. Not for timeshare, but it's, I think it's the idea of somebody who is creating a kind of a collaborative sphere so that people can find something where they can financing artists together until a level, then they own the music, something like that. But one of the things which we also have to keep in mind is that the blockchain is only a basic technology. So, there is already the next iteration of that technology ready to use. It's a blockchain on steroids. It's Ethereum. It was done by a Russian guy, Vitaly Buterin. His company is already worth, I think, one billion and he put an application layer on this registering technology where you can combine the registration with a smart contract. So a contract which is readable by machine. So you can, just like a record contract, you can digitize the contract into the numbers crunching is down so that the machine can read this contract. So you could already combine registering and until to the payment. So it's already, this is something which is working already. So it could work. Okay, that's something else that I had read as being another possible application of blockchain is that it would have a record not just of these, of just transactions but actual larger data such as contracts and stuff like that. Although it's on a person to person, not, if you're speaking not about artists and labels, but more between maybe artists and people. I'm not sure how that would be necessary, I guess. But tell me more about what you're talking about like a sort of a, you mentioned it not being so much a timeshare but a crowdsourcing perhaps, or in terms of helping an artist to make something. Yes, not a Kickstarter. I don't have something really specific in mind that you really could use from start. So I'm more looking into the overall blockchain technology. So for instance, there are a lot of, I met some people at South Face of West in Austin which telling you that oh, we have solved the metadata problem of the music industry because we can build everything on blockchain. And then you think about oh, maybe you don't know, you know only one tiny problem they may have, you can't solve every problem. And then you're going back and have a look at that technology and doing something like only solving a tiny problem. So a lot of people jumping around and saying we can solve the problem. But the problem won't be saved by a simple technology alone. So you have to think about if you're really changing or exchanging your data with somebody else, who would benefit while you're exchanging data, what will change in general. So this is something you have to think before you're trying to use this technology. So technology won't save something if you don't think about the application, what's behind that. So that's also very important. Well, one of the things that's interesting about the blockchain is that it's a permanent record. It sets something in stone. But one of the things that's interesting about the Intranet, especially in terms of a recent release, Kanye West's The Life of Pablo, is that he seems to be constantly changing this release. This release is constantly updating. So if on one hand an artist like Kanye West is changing what might actually constitute an album, maybe that goes against what the blockchain is useful for. So, if one of the benefits of digital music is that you can constantly have a release that's changing slightly as time goes on versus something that is set in stone. But when you're registering a song, for instance, in the blockchain, then you're registering maybe the rights as well. So, if you're altering the song, then you can also link the same blockchain to the altered song, if you have the same rights included. If you not have the same rights included, you're opening up a new blockchain. So I think it's not difficult to handle that. Also, in which most people don't know that you can also have a private blockchain. So, for instance, the financial industry will create a blockchain which is not open to everybody. So, in general, if just thinking theoretically, if the music industry would invest itself in blockchain technology, it would be able to invest in a closed silo for them, which works only for maybe the major players or something like that. So it's also possible. You don't have to open up this to everybody, but you have to open up to everybody who is working on that system. So, then it will be transparent to the little artist who's registering the song firsthand. Then it goes to publisher, then it goes to a little small label who's licensing to the major label. The major label is licensing this to the distributor and so on in all these territories. So, in general, it's possible to do this inside this. You don't have to open up this to the general public. You can keep it in your universe. That's also what people don't understand. Yeah, yeah. So, of course, there could be a public blockchain and there could be a private one too. And not only that, but the whole idea being that the blockchain could keep records of all of the changes that are made to anything, actually. But because ultimately the blockchain is... In terms of music, it sounds like it could... it's really just the ledger. In terms of money, it's... it is the money. But it is the bitcoin. Bitcoins are the blockchain. But in terms of music, the music exists outside of the blockchain, doesn't it? Yes. So, it actually makes it a different thing. Also, Musik ist, für die meisten, wenn du physical objects take away, Musik ist endlich replikatable. So, warum ist es nicht wichtig, die Rekorde zu halten, die was und wer das Piracy betrifft? Oder wie wird das Piracy betrifft? Anders, wie wenn ich es zum Beispiel próximo sein würde und danach wohl auf correl blades starten rout emp йогоoning zusammen, Tränen MP3, geben uns MP3, das würde nicht auf der Blockchain sein. Ich glaube, ich habe mich nicht gefragt, was das Punkt ist. Das ist natürlich, als die Blockchain-Technologie die Metadata-Dissertion der Musikindustrie nicht solch zu lösen. Es ist auch nicht die Piracy-Probleme solch zu lösen. Aber wenn du die Rechte ins Blockchain registerst, und du mit dieser Technologie in der Musikindustrie arbeiten, als Theorie, dann kannst du auch deine Stilverstärker, deine Online-Services, zu checken, diese Rechte automatisch. Du kannst sie sofort sehen, welche Rechte sie in ihrer Gebete nutzen können. Du musst nicht mit den Arten von Lawyers arbeiten. Das ist das größte Problem in der Musikindustrie, als du in einer Online-Service startest. Ich habe es ein paar Jahre ago gemacht, und es ist wirklich ein Werk, das ich nie in meiner Leben wieder tun werde. Es ist so frustrierend, zu sprechen zu den Menschen, die Musikrechte haben. Wenn es automatisch automatisch sein würde, dann kannst du nur als die Stilverstärker in der Blockchain registern. Du kannst alle Material-Services haben. Du hast auch clean Material-Services. Du hast Rechte, die du wirklich aus der Schriftstelle benutzen kannst. Oder du siehst, was du nicht benutzen kannst. Dann wäre es wirklich sehr leicht, mit einer Musikservice zu beginnen, mit einem bestimmten Content, die in der Blockchain registern wird. Das ist in der Theorie sehr gut. Man könnte nicht, dass man tofu mich liefeit, 24 Zeit learns das Wetter und die Schl리 kommt bis zum Wetter. Unglaublich oft. Es gibt Hamburger� stunning K connotiert Graziliansrallye. Diecomes behavioral leaders und bekanntlich ärmste der Vulper Spiel winners Kane fig Jeju Ubara So, this is something you don't get with any other company in the music business. So they are trying to, they don't use blockchain, but they have already the mindset of opening up their data and sharing it with their customers, because their customers are not only the guys who are selling the music, their customers also the rights holders. So they are working to both sides quite transparent. And that's a huge step forward. But it's only one company I know, so maybe you know some more companies from that as well. Well, I mean speaking of that, there is actually, there is a company, it's called Open Ledger, and they've joined up with the Danish Bitcoin Exchange CCEDK and are joining forces with Muse to make a music tailored blockchain. So, so this is pretty much exactly what we are talking about. This is blockchain technology working specifically for the music industry. They defined, what is the special thing of a music tailored blockchain. Well, I tried to get that, but I was not able to find that what was really tailored for the music industry. Well, you know, I've read this article, which was published in Forbes in January of this year. So I'm not, I don't know whether this article was published before the launch of this company or after the launch of this company, but suffice it to say that there is not enough data yet to really know how it's doing. But it reads as though it's a fancy subscription slash online store. I assume. Much in the same way as Apple Music or other, otherwise. I assume that's just a simple marketing for making themselves interesting or something like that. If you really don't get it, what they are talking about, the music tailored blockchain, what is music tailored blockchain? They are, one of the things that they are selling. Making suits for musicians or something. Well, one of the things that they're using as they're advertising is that the artists would actually receive a high percentage of sales income, as in more than 90% of the sales would go directly to the artist, which is pretty much the Bandcamp model. But although Bandcamp actually are working more in the realm of 15 and 10%. So, I'm assuming this means that they're working directly with artists. And this was to try to get artists to sign up with them. Now the problem I thought with this article is Peer Tracks is basically you have to use their cryptocurrency in order to use this service. And that I see as being a bit of a assembling block, because it's one thing to be fascinated by cryptocurrency and it's quite another to actually invest in a cryptocurrency. But their cryptocurrency would be tied to the US dollar. And they're saying that if you were paid in their currency, then you would be able to use their currency with anywhere that accepts a debit card. So it's still a bit murky though. We're still in early days here. I feel as though the blockchain is technology that could potentially change the face of money. It's already in the process of changing the face of money. But I'm having, it's still blurry how it could change the face of music as effectively as it's doing for money. I think one thing very important is that we all make clear or get it in our head. That's really in a data driven world. It's music, movement of music and money has to be frictionless. So that's very, very important. But it isn't, but as soon as you combine music with a cryptocurrency, then you're moving away from mainstream and making your music available. Because most of the people don't own the cryptocurrency wallet. So that's not changing that much. And we are still in the early days. And if you want to try out something, it's better maybe to use something last Friday, IBM has announced that they are going to release a beta version of a black blockchain as a service. So whenever you have some people in your company trying to think about trying out something with blockchain, then you go to IBM and trying out what their API are doing with your registering your metadata, that you get a feeling of that. And not going with companies approaching you, we won't solve your problems. And then you use it together with cryptocurrency. So first try to understand what type of problem could be solved with this technology. And then it's good if a company just like the big blue IBM is offering this as a service for trying out. This is something you can work just with one or two developers and you're getting just an idea quite quickly. And if you have the right idea, develop this step by step, then you may find a business model which is not seen until now. And also which is very important, these following technology, where I was talking about Ethereum, which puts the application layer on the blockchain technology. It's also not that secure. So they are not secure just like the underlying blockchain technology. It's a version which came out and it's not bulletproof. So they have to prove their security against hackers and all that kind of stuff. So it's really, really early. And that's why I, if you want solve something in the music industry, then you should concentrate on music first. That's also quite nice. So that's moving people at the moment and for the next years. But if you want to try out something, if you really want to know what's behind that, then try to figure out just a little problem and see what this technology could do for you and not going with the big gun until the little birds or how we in Germany say mit Kanonen auf Spazen schießen, that's not necessary in that case. Yeah, I mean, it seems like in a lot of ways that obviously music is not the problem. But it's really music industry is the problem. So and there's... But that's also the big difference. You don't have to combine the problem of the music with the problem of the music industry. So even if the music industry won't survive as it is today, the music will survive, that's for sure. I agree. Yeah, music will survive and it definitely feels as though artists will be able to find an audience via the internet no matter what. And even now, like frictionless is a word that comes up a lot when talking about blockchain. And I would actually say that something like Bandcamp has made the music industry much more frictionless, if not completely frictionless, because instead of there being multiple middle men, now there's just one middle man. As an artist, you can put your music on Bandcamp, sell it there. They take a cut, 10 or 15%, depending on how much you sell, and then you... That's it. There's just that. Whereas you talk about the traditional model, you have a big label, you have a distributor, you have a record store, and then you have the person. Or in this case, you have a record label, or in the digital case, you have a record label, you have the digital distributor, and then maybe the person. So I feel as though the music industry is heading that way already, is what I'm saying. And they're doing that way... They're doing it without necessarily using the blockchain. The other thing that's important about the blockchain is that it's a distributed network. And I'm also having... So what that means is... That's partly why it's so solid, and it can't be altered, is because it's a distributed network, everybody's got the same information, everyone's got access to the same information, and transactions are actually verified by the network. But when you're talking about music, again, and even if someone were to come up with a blockchain idea, it would probably be held in one company's database. One institution's database, maybe, or... I'm basically wondering how it would become a distributed network, and therefore actually be a blockchain. Yeah, but of course, that's also part of the paradigm that's have to change. If I'm the original creator, I have to be that person who is creating the source, or that the first block in the chain. That's my song, and I'm registering. This is my song. It's already registered, all the participants are registered. And then the next step is I'm altering this because I'm selling this right to a company. I'm selling the publishing, maybe, to a company. So I'm the original keeper of the first block. Gotcha. I see what you're saying now. From that point, maybe there is something, just like a major record label, which then is attracting you and asking you for licensing. But they then, on top of this originally created blockchain of the creator, they can stop that and try to, just like they're now doing, they're stopping everything, which is existing, and then they start in their own blockchain. That won't happen. So that's something that there must be an original owner, even if there are several rights holders. But somebody has to start with the original block, and that should be the creator. And that's why it's possible to do this from scratch. Somebody could try to do this with a network of ideas, a network of people. And that's the fascinating story about that. Now, that is an idea, actually, because obviously that would mean a different block for any given song or any given album or anything like that. But all it would really take is one massive band slash record to kick it off, perhaps. And for instance, it was announced that Radiohead scrubbed their entire internet presence yesterday or last night or something like this. So if Radiohead were to then announce that they were going to be selling their record this way and that everything would be authenticated via the blockchain, that would be interesting. Would be interesting, but it's also just a tiny demonstration of something that could be possible later on. Also, when I'm talking about the original, the idea of an original keeper of something which was created, it's not new. So I think the record companies started with this idea long, long ago, and we, because with the so-called ISRC code, this was mentioned to giving, that was the idea, giving a track, a universal idea which could be used everywhere. But it never happened, because the company licensed this to another company, and they gave the same song in another ISRC, and then they produced the compilation, and the song became another ISRC, and so at the end they messed up. And that's the problem. The idea was there already, so that it's only working to have clean metadata with one idea which will never change. And from this, you can always follow the way this music is going through the world. And the idea is not new, but now it's possible to do this with guarantee against manipulation and all that kind of stuff. So that's new, that it's really technically possible that you can go to the complete chain without the block, or without blocking. So that's... Well, I mean, then that is at least one takeaway from this, is that it's got to start with the artists. Yeah, yeah, do you have a question? Actually, we are going to open it up to question and answer, but if you... but go ahead. Super interesting so far. I was wondering, are there any interesting business models or ideas using blockchain in the creative industries besides the music industry? So are there maybe some blueprints for ideas to implement in the music context? Ich habe etwas, das die Leute wollen, mit Fotos zu versuchen. Denn das ist auch etwas, das ist ziemlich einfach, weil ich den Be estudientyflo Thermal, K hari Wона, eine Ein salary-S przepfung für die Maharinen. Das ist etwas, was ich gehört habe, aber es ist nicht so wirklich erfolgreich. Wie gesagt, wir sind wirklich, wenn Sie sagen, etwas, es ist nicht schon die Sonne. Es ist nur Nacht. Wenn jemand zu dir sagt, dass es schon Nacht ist, dann nicht die Sonne, das ist nur Nacht. Hallo, da ist ein Berlin-based Start-up, der Ascribe. Das ist für die Artist, das ist ein Online-Notarie und ein Timestamp, wo du deine Artwork uploaden kannst. Es kann deine Digitalartwork sein, auch deine Artwork-Picture, Videos. Aber du kannst auch die Pictures des Analog-Artworks uploaden. Das ist ein Online-Timestamp. Sie haben es nicht, sie haben keine Verleihung. Sie haben das Notariefunktionen für jetzt. Aber sie arbeiten mit anderen Firmen, die einen Plattform haben, wo du deine Artwork verkaufen kannst. Sie passen auf die Digital-Rechts, die du verkaufen oder die du rentiert hast, mit der Transparen-Dauer. Sie sind hier in Berlin, in Prenzlau-Aberg. Wenn Sie sich interessiert, kann ich Ihnen etwas mehr über das sagen. Ujum-Musik mit Emoge und Heap, sie haben einen Prototypen, die diese Musik haben. Ja, das war der Prototypen. Es ist sehr viel in einem Prototypenstadion. Du bist sehr gut, wir sind in den sehr jetzigen Städten der Technologie. Das ist ein Verleihungs-Kassel, die arbeiten zusammen mit dem MAK in Vien. Die traditionellen Museums wollen digital alle Artwork und Regen-Straße uploaden. Es ist schon passiert, aber es sind Baby-Straße. Für mich sieht die Welt der Art, die mit der Blockchain starten, eine Industrie, in der man die Certifikate von Authentizität und Ownerschaft brauchen. Das macht perfekt Sinn. Die Lotterie ist auch sehr gut. Die Leute wollen Digital-Lotterie machen, weil das Blockchain perfekt ist. Aber ich möchte sagen, dass das nicht so wahr ist, dass wir in den jetzigen Städten der Blockchain sind. Die Blockchain ist seit rund 7 Jahren. Das war ein Punkt, das in einem Artikel in den LRB, den Lenden-Reviewen, von der Blockchain gemacht wurde. 7 Jahre ist ein langes Zeit in der Technologie. Nein, das ist auch so. Ich war als Beispiel an der Konferenz 2 Monate ago, und sie hat mir gesagt, dass das selbstgeheurende Auto nicht in den US gewandt war. Wir hatten in 1988 einen selbstgeheurende Auto von Munich zu Kiel, mit 180 kmh. Es war ein Mercedes, und es war durch deutsche Engenieure gemacht. Es war 1988. Am Ende sind wir jetzt mehr als 20 Jahre später. Ich weiß auch, dass die Geschichte von all diesen MP3-Kindern ist. Manchmal ist es ein langer Weg, dass die Leute vergessen, wie lange es am Ende dauert, von der wirklichen Invention. Das war ein Papier, das Herr Nakamoto aus dem Technologie nicht war. Nein, das Papier kam aus 2008, also 8 Jahre. Aber Bitcoin fing in 2009, in dem Anfang 2009. Aber ich möchte nur sagen, dass es heute nicht so ist, dass wir Apps haben. Vielleicht ist das der Geist der App zwei Monate lang. Aber wirklich, die technische Verbrauchung der Kräfte ist nicht... Manchmal ist es wirklich langer, als wir es erwähnen. Wir geben uns Zeit, weil Bitcoin nur eine sehr gute App, eine sehr gute App, die wir so lange sehen. Und Bitcoin existiert in diesem Raum der quasi-legalität. Das ist wahrscheinlich warum es so lange dauert. Aber dieser Autor hat das Beispiel von Twitter, Facebook und anderen sozialen Netzwerken. Und diese haben sich mit einem sehr vorhandenen Haushaltverbrauch geworden. So, wie man es mit physischen Technologien, wie die Automated Car, sieht. Vielleicht ein perfekter Beispiel. Okay, so, wir nehmen jetzt noch Fragen aus dem Publikum. Ich bin sicher, dass es viele Fragen in Ihren Augen gibt. Wir reden hier theoretisch sehr viel. Stefan, kannst du dir das Wort, was du mit mir aus dem Southwestern begonnen hast? Wenn du gesagt hast, dass alle großen Verbraucher bei der Metadata-Panel sind, was war deine Meinung? Was meine Meinung ist, dass ich sehr frustriert bin. Und ich bin negativ über das. Wir haben auch darüber gesprochen. Das war nicht meine Intention, um in die negative Füße der Leute, die ein Problem haben, zu gehen. Aber es ist wirklich so. Ich arbeite im Metadata-Business für eine sehr lange Zeit. Ich bin immer interessiert, ob jemand über die Metadata-Probleme reden kann. Es gab vier oder fünf Panels im Süden und Süden Westen. Und ich denke, dass es von allen Verbrauchern, die in Musikindustrie sind, in der Panel war. Es war 7-Digital, Pandora, Naxpix Sound, Pandora, Orchid, Rytodos-Organisation, das war von Frans, es war ein Ascape von Amerika, ein Mann von Berkeley, Musikkollege, viele Leute. Und das Strange ist, dass wir alle darüber gesprochen haben, dass wir verloren sind. Das ist die Metadata-Dezester, und wir haben keine Ahnung, wie wir das lösen können. Und ich dachte immer, was man tun würde, war immer die gleiche Frage. Es kam von jemandem, von der Audience. Und jemand sagte, wie man das lösen könnte. Vielleicht musst du dein Data exchangeieren. Und jeder Verbraucher sagte das Gleiche. Wir werden nie mit diesem Verbrauchern meine Data mitnehmen. certaines Verbrauchern, dann macht es, ihnen nicht aufuhentioniert zu sein und direkt so herauszukонkalled. Und er sagte, oder, 23 weitere Staffel, der wird massiv® Adam, Aber es ist peainlich, was dieseStürme gibt. Bei Vietnamese Gymnasium gibt es 4 sería, die drei sind gekürzt. Aber vielleicht ist das Teil des Systems. Denn wenn das System so kompliziert ist, ist es eine Entschließungsberierung für andere Menschen. Oder, wie ich denke, Imogen Heep sagt das, oder jemand aus der Garten, der hier mit uns war, sagt, dass wenn du nicht siehst, dass etwas falsch geht, du ihn nicht kann. Wenn das System so kompliziert ist, dann findest du nichts, wo du dich nicht verabschiedest. Ich habe nur die Frage, aber das war wirklich frustrierend, dass alle sagen, nein. Ich würde sagen, dass es eine philosophische Stanz ist, oder eine ideologische Stanz. Sie sind so nah zu nicht etwas zu bezeiten, weil in aller Ernst, die Metadata, die auf einem Basik-Level, wenn wir über die Tags, die auf die MP3 kommen, die Artist-Titel-Jährung, vielleicht etwas Stubes wie Genre, vielleicht die UPC-Kode, das Kindesstück, warum nicht du das Informationen nicht teilen? Aber, ja, anyway. Ich denke, dass die beste Musikerkaufstelle in der Publikum-Broadcast-Station ist. Sie haben es gefunden, dass das eine Asset für alle Stationen, die von Deutschland sind, dass sie ein zentralisiertes Katalog von Musikerkaufstelle haben. Ich denke, dass sie 7-8 Menschen, die normalisieren, die Metadata, die die Musikindustrie von sie bekommen. Das ist für 30 oder 40 Jahre, die das tun. Und alle wollen diese Daten haben. Und sie sagen, nein, das ist unsere Asset. Wir haben erzielt, dass das eine Asset ist. Und wir bekommen nicht von dir was, das ist warum wir das nicht mit dir teilen. So, Gamer und alle Metadata-Kompagnen fragen sie jeden Monat, jeden Tag. Und sie sagen, nein, weil das unsere Asset ist. Das ist ein Service, das nennt sich das Zentraler Schallplatten-Katalog. Das war wirklich in der 90-70-D-Tour, lange bevor die Digitalisierung auf dem Broadcast ging. Das ist ein Asset. So, nächste Frage. Zwei Dinge. Das erste ist, dass ich denke, weil der Blockchain für so lange Zeit schlafen konnte, dass es kein Nehmen und kein Problem war, das zu verabschieden. Es war immer eine einfache Solution für alles, wie Spotify oder Apple Music, wie die Streaming-Service, die Artisten. Für sie ist es leichter, ein Streaming-Service zu haben und viel Geld zu verlieren, als sich die Reise und die Fertigung von sich selbst zu geben. Und das andere ist, dass ich denke, es ist ein Lack von Erkrankungen. Die meisten Artisten, die Industrie- und die meisten Leute, die in der Musikindustrie arbeiten, wissen nicht viel über Blockchain. Es sollte mehr Erkrankungen sein, vielleicht starten Universitäten. Aber die Generation, die sich umkommen oder in der Musikindustrie zu wundern, weiß schon mehr über Blockchain, als die jungen Leute in der Musikindustrie. Die zwei Dinge, es gab keinen Nehmen, und das andere ist, es gab keine Bildung. Wir reden alle über etwas, das noch in der Nacht ist. Wir haben noch nicht wirklich gesehen, wie es sich auf der Bikon-Service funktioniert. Ich sage nicht, dass wir alle Musikien mit der Blockchain-Technologie educieren. Es ist nicht notwendig, jede Musikie mit einem sehr famoen Bassplayer zu benutzen. Es ist nicht notwendig, wie lange es eine fantastische Musik gibt. Es muss jemand sein, ob er in der Band ist oder ein Freund der Band oder der Management. Er sollte das wissen. Das ist das wichtigste Problem, das viele Musiker haben. Sie wissen viele Musiker. Sie denken, dass sie auf Facebook aktiv sind. Wenn sie etwas in den sozialen Netzwerken machen, ist es besser, das zu tun, als zu gehen in die Röhrsruhe. Das ist das wichtigste, um Musik zu schaffen. Das ist das perfekte, was möglich ist. Dann muss jemand, der das tun will, so lange es ist. Ich habe das mitgegeben, dass sie ein Ideal bekommen, oder die richtigen Menschen zu finden. Aber man kann alles tun. Es ist eine Konversation, die dazwischen passiert. Aber die Männchen haben noch die Möglichkeit, die Musik zu tun. Es gibt nicht nur Musiker, die die Männchen oder die Labeln haben. Ich werde etwas tun. In der Metadata-Kurs, ich bin in Manheim im Pop-Akademie. Es ist sehr schwierig, weil sie nicht in der Kurs müssen sein. Es ist freiwillig. Es ist eine Option für sie. Einige Leute gehen zu ihnen, und sie sehen nur wie ein Board. Wenn die Blockchain als Standard ist, dann würde sie mehr über das lernen. Es ist eine Konversation, die zwischen jüngeren Musikern, die im digitalen Raum arbeiten, betrachten. Mike? Ich bin der Herr von DOMERS, der deutschen Arzt, für die Arzt. Wenn ich dir das richtig schaue, dass die Metadata-Kurs nicht ein technisches Problem ist. Aber es ist ein Problem der Wille, dass die Mitglieder nicht mit dem Thema mitnehmen. Ja, ich gebe dir ein Beispiel. Wir als Institut haben die Metadata-Normalisation für MaxDOM, die Video-Service, und sie haben ein Problem, wenn Netflix kommt. Netflix wird gesagt, dass sie in Deutschland starten. Und dann, bis MaxDOM ist Nummer 1, und sie wird nervös. Netflix kommt, sie haben ein perfekter Recommendation-Angen. Wir müssen auch die Recommendation machen. Dann haben sie dieritership-Kons anniversary, das ist der 않아ste Problem. Sie haben was hier zu tun. Fernsehen, FilFRs, Organisation,utable years doffs annual doff or tyo und es kostet viel Geld. Wenn man es hat, ist es funktioniert. Sie haben die Technologie von den Rekommendationen vor sechs Wochen erzielt. Sie sind sehr glücklich. Aber die Basis ist Daten. Sie wissen deine Daten, es ist clean. Dann kann man etwas tun. Als du nicht clean Mater-Date, kann man nichts tun. Hier kommt meine Frage. Das war nur eine Ersache, dass ich das richtig verstehe. Wenn wir unsere Imagination benutzen und wir alle die Metadaten haben und die Musikindustrie in der Blockchain benutzen, was sind die Improvenz in der Imagination? Ich denke, 10 Jahre von jetzt haben wir alle das. Was ist die Improvenz? Was ist besser in 10 Jahren als heute? Wie gesagt, wenn man eine Musiker-Werte hat, hat die gleichen Metadaten um die Welt und hat die servicen, die das Metadaten haben und die Daten wieder darunter zu geben, man lernt die Usage und die Kusster. Man macht es frisch und leidlich, wenn man Musik mit servicen reist. Das ist sehr wichtig. Die servicen sind dann mehr glücklich, weil sie nicht mehr die Armee der Lawyer haben müssen. Sie können die Geld wieder zurückgeben, so schnell wie möglich. Es ist nicht egal, wer die Welt mit der Arbeit benutzt, alle haben die gleichen Metadaten. Und jede Daten aus der Usage kommt dann an die zentralisierte Stelle. Das ist ein sehr großer Schritt. Können Sie das sagen? Es gibt weniger Gatekeepers, mehr direkte Kontakt? Ja, das ist ein Friction-Less. Es ist weniger Mittelmeer. Es ist auch weniger Lawyer, weniger jahre, weniger jahre. Es gibt mehr jahre Transaktionen, mehr Geld für die Artist, aber wir müssen schauen, ob das passiert ist. Wir haben noch eine Frage. Ja, genau. Mein Name ist Hans Dorsch. Ich bin ein Tech-Journalist. Es ist eine Musik-Konsumers-Fraktion. Dasboardertatcher בא� Hui, auf der Sie es nicht schkausig haben kann, sich zumgga folded. Sie aller CPA-S surrendert, die sie cho Vic padding hatte. Zum zurück diplomasoftert sich das Version Episode und das bip in dem Service. Es ist anders auf verschiedenen Services und es ist ein Schmerz in den Schmerzen. Vielleicht ist es ein nerviger Problem, aber es ist hart. Man kann nicht wirklich einen Artist so sehen. Was ist Ihre Frage? Meine Frage ist, wenn wir alle das gelingen. Wenn Sie sagen, Sie starten mit diesem Rekord von einem Track, würde es möglich sein, alle Publikationen zu tracken, auf welchem Rekord es publiziert wurde, wenn es erst einmal in jeder Service ging, könnte Spotify das benutzen, Apple Music das benutzen? Das wäre natürlich der Ziel dieser Systeme. Wir denken nicht auf die neuen Musik. Wenn man wirklich als Konsequenz auf alle diese Kategorie arbeitet, muss man das Album, das original von Sam Cook, als die originalen Rekorddaten für dieses Album starten. Es wird dann nie manipuliert. Es gibt auch die Re-Release, 20 Jahre später, aber diese Arbeit ist in diesem mentioned Archive von den Publikationen, die haben diese Daten. Sie haben die originalen Rekorddaten, die in der Database sind, und sie haben alle die verschiedenen Releases, wo dieser Track in einem German-Katholik auf CDs oder so. Sie haben diese Daten, und das ist genau das Problem. Ich sehe auch viele, wenn man diese Spotify-Liste, die für dich gemacht wurde, auf jeden Montag, dann geht man zur Trackliste, dann hört man ein Track, und so глаза, es lohnt sich leicht. Wenn man sagt, was dieses Ding klingt, Das muss ein Album sein. Wo ist das original Album? Dann du wirst in die Internet searchen und du wirst nicht mehr diese Informationen bekommen. Dann wirst du irgendwie verloren. Es ist ein nördiger Problem, natürlich von Musiklobbern. Aber Musiklobbern spenden viel mehr Geld als jede andere Person, die Musikfreie auf der Radio oder auf YouTube oder so. Das sind Musiklobber oder die Menschen, die Musik business fahren. Kann ich dir das sagen? Das ist das beste Referenz für die Information, die du übernachst. Okay, manchmal. apparently classic music has a problem like that as well, but that's out of my scope. Then they have different conductors and performings. That's much harder because the copyright is expired on so many of those compositions. So anybody can record and release that music. Okay, thank you. I think we'll wrap up here. You want to say a last question. It's very impressive that a lot of people are trying to dive into this a little bit. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks. Super interesting. For those of you who are really interested in this topic, Peter hat etwas in den nächsten Wochen zu tun. Ja, wenn man einen dieser Flirre hat, ist das für den Musik-Tekfest, das Ende des Monats. Da ist das Blockchainwirt. Was passiert ist, dass wir im 23. oder 27. Jahrhundert ein 5-Jähriger-Laboratoren machen. Wenn man sich das übernimmt, wenn du aus jeder Canada Ramay isst und eine sehronser einzige
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This Music Pool Berlin community evening @ rpTEN is about the potential of the blockchain technology for the music business. In general, the Music Pool Berlin community evenings provide a platform for musicians to find out more about current music business topics, and get to know each other and other players in the music scenes. This evening at rpTEN is organized in cooperation with the Berlin Music Commission and its networking format BMC backstage.
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10.5446/20681 (DOI)
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As I said, it's about Panama Leaks and I want to get on stage. Max Hoppenstedt, he's chief editor of Motherboard. Renata Avila, campaign lead at the Web We Want Foundation. And last but not least, Frederik Obermeier, one of the main journalists at SET dealing with Panama Leaks. The stage is yours. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I want to say briefly in the very beginning thank you to Republica for letting us do this panel and squeezing it in on very short notice as the Panama Papers are actually still pretty current. So thank you to the program team and to everyone and congrats to a fantastic Republica 10 actually as well. Yeah, with me on stage, Renata and Frederik and I think everyone is aware what we're actually talking about with the Panama Papers and we only have 30 minutes. So I want to dive right into asking you about this and then hopefully we'll have 10 to 15 minutes to take questions from you, the audience. Yeah, so Frederik, the leak or the publication of the Panama Papers is only four or five weeks. When you look back at it and you've been working on it for over a year from what I understand, are you content with the impact? What do you make of the global reactions? To be honest, I was a little bit surprised by the impact because as we researched into the data for over a year, it was like at some points we lost the contact to reality in a way because we always counted this story who is going to research that. And in the end, it was us speaking what are you do have this head of state, you found that head of state work great but seeing now what this worldwide investigation led to that's great that we see that there is a international debate or global debate about text evasion about this shadow world of offshore. And but at the same time, for us, it's still important to focus on our on the running investigations because I mean we are still digging into the data. I suppose there are still great stories hidden in this treasure trove, and we have to find them. So for us, the workers on. I think apart from the political ramifications that spilled out in the hours and days afterwards we had a sort of interesting situation that just hours after the release and the publication there was a big debate starting on the on some sort of meter level about the way this should be publicized. So there was a lot of people from in Germany, Sarah Wagen Knecht to prominent bloggers or, yeah, like new journalists that use YouTube to all sorts of Internet commentaries and voices in media and some media as well that actually were kind of not happy with with the reporting and we're complaining that something was hidden from them or hold back and I've just found it astonishing that the same people that would complain about something being hidden from this secret shadow forces or whatever that that high things were complaining about an investigation that actually shed light on one of the biggest secret of the world. What what did you make of that? I mean that was an interesting situation for us as well because we thought that there may be discussions but not that fast because I mean we thought that people would first step speak about what's hidden in there and about the revelations but we recognize now that there was a parallel debate about the way of publication and I mean that's good so it's always good to reflect what we have done and we should change something in the future and but for us what we have learned about it that we have to communicate very openly and explain what we have done and why we have done and why we have not done something so for us that was interesting but it was a learning process as well. Renata your reaction just I think hours after the publication on that Sunday evening of the Panama Papers was I remember a tweet from you that read something like full docs or it didn't happen. What what what what did you what did you mean by that and why would you say that. My reaction was a mix I mean I come from Guatemala and it is basically Panama is the main place where all the not even the not even the politicians but the whole elite of Central America hires their wealth. Central America is one of the regions in the world with the highest inequality the systemic problems of corruption and so on so for me hearing at the Panama Papers I was super excited you know because the whole region has is in this process of we setting up anti corruption institution by the United Nations that has really like we had we have a president in the prison and the vice president in the prison and around 50 top officers in the prison but somehow the private sector is still quite protected and we know that they the government doesn't act in isolation they do these kind of dealings so it was a big kind of hope for the the the activists citizens engage in this process in all the countries so then when we saw nothing and we saw and we saw that the documents were just glimpses of at what was going on. Especially in my community of lawyers and human rights lawyers who we are quite familiar with what kind of documents and we which kind of information we could found in those papers if we had access to the whole database like for example dates dates when coinciding with certain events happening inside the country. Matching the travels the public travels of some public officers with with the documents that we have. The fake people that they put and they forced to sign the documents you know at their offices how would you have to go there's so many layers of secrecy that having full access not to the database it was a way to understand a systemic problem and how to tackle it by dismantling this complex complex net. So I saw it that we went like. 2008 2009 times of journalism and it was it was not it was we perceived many of people like me perceive that it was a journalist not trusting the intelligence and the ability of people to do amazing things for the public good like. Even if that is personal knowledge is superior to the knowledge of a bunch of journalists. So when you when you're saying like publish the docs are you calling for a publication to the like full public for example WikiLeaks style or are you calling for a publication to. To certain groups to lawyers for example to deal with the with these with these documents or what what would your preference be you have someone on stage you could maybe. Obviously my preference will be publication the way that by the way journalistic organization I thought that we had left behind well behind the debate of whether journalism WikiLeaks journalism or is not I mean it is and it was it wasn't disputed and was like actually that was one of the points. That made me really uncomfortable about the press release we are journalists not like WikiLeaks it was like what anyway but yeah the way that this organization had handle. Data and actually the way that you can play with different releases in the public interest and combine them I have done it myself with a little. The cables released by WikiLeaks and documents released by the Global Intelligence files and all the documents so that's when the situation gets really interesting because we are talking about situations that are connected with each other you know and only this ability to play. I mean now we have the computing ability to get to to arrive to conclusions and to get the bad guys to the place they deserve like faster but with drip drop we cannot achieve that and we miss a big opportunity. 2016 is actually sees the 10th year since the founding of WikiLeaks astonishingly enough and I think we've seen many different ways leaks and whistleblowing can be reported and are reported and the strategies. The way the documents are handled from from cable gate to collateral damage to Snowden leak and to things like Swiss leaks and stuff that the research of a bond has been working on from and the answer to its title Frederick what would you say there is a. Is there a crisis in investigative journalism is there a resurrection is it has it always been like this is traditional media picking up to outlets like WikiLeaks. No I think at the moment we learned that apart from WikiLeaks who by the way do a great job and I like that you what they're doing but I think in the last years we have seen. Alternatives to WikiLeaks because I mean 10 years ago WikiLeaks has had a unique selling point was at a time when investigative journalists. Had to learn their lessons for example regarding encryption and stuff like that and WikiLeaks really was great and is great on that point but now we see. The whistleblowers and sources to have the possibility to choose what to do they can go to WikiLeaks they can do I mean there are heaps heaps of. Media houses who have encrypted ways of communication or ways of dropping information or even people that are going to NGOs like Greenpeace and dropping material there so for a whistleblower I think it's a great time and great. Great because they can choose where to go and what fits their needs and for example what fits their needs of regarding. I think it's a great time to talk about the security of the source and the source has to be protected I mean during this investigations there have been so many people worldwide revealed that may have an interest of doing harm to the source. So for us it's the most important thing at the moment to protect the source and this has nothing to do with a feeling of superiority for example just this in this week's I see a J in Switzerland thinking about whom to involve in this project to open it up because there are. Many countries in the world that have not really reported to that extent that they should be but for us the risk of exposing the source may be unintentionally by putting all of the data into the public that is too high and I mean for us there's a responsibility because. We don't want our whistleblower in prison or even worse that I mean we have seen certain whistleblowers that are in prison now and so I do understand the wish of the source to stay anonymous and at the same time or doing so protecting his life. Well I just want to respond that the publication of whole database can be done in a way that it at the same time serves two purposes I mean there are ways to actually. To. Not only anonymize this the source with anonymize the range of the periods of time out there first document last document that might indicate the first login and last login of the person if that was the way that it was acquired. But I do agree I disagree with you and I agree with you in this flourishing of maybe I will be really happy today that we can do is not needed anymore do you know and all these brilliant people can move to the next innovative thing. But it is still a need I need. We could so obviously as we have seen how media is pressured. All of the word to censor and protect the powerful you know. If you look at the recent history I mean many media have been in the spot like at covering up companies corrupt companies are covering up powerful people injunction injunctions and all these kind of mechanisms. But the thing that worries me the most I mean you say that you're very concerned with your source about your source. All media say that they are very concerned about the source. I mean even the Guardian said that they were very concerned about snow then at the moment of the of the release and there's no institutionalized mechanisms to protect sources. I mean it took Amnesty International years years to to include and support Chelsea money. It took I mean it all the human rights organizations froze with snow then I mean that's actually I am part of the advisory board of Corash Foundation we had to put together this foundation because no one was daring to help him. I mean now everyone is praising him you know at that moment was an absolute paralysis and inability to react and really protect the source. I mean that's the reality in the in the West I imagine in Africa in Africa and in Latin America many many times it will be it will pay with the life. So I hope that this creates some awareness that we need robust publication as long as we have robust mechanisms to protect sources. A good source protection like the one that Corash Foundation is trying to set up will lead to more robust and fearless publication. I think. Did you want to say it. I mean for us we thought a lot about this topic and there are several points that were very important for us. We spoke with dozens of experts on a tea experts and experts on the in this offshore business and they actually told us you cannot 100 percent guarantee that if you publish this documents that there is no hint in there that may lead to the source. And what is more important or at the same time important for us is I mean the source gave it to us for a journalistic purpose and the source as far as we know is well aware that there exists something like WikiLeaks. So we to a certain extent also have to respect what the source has given the material to us obviously because it wanted to us to work on it and wanted for example in this case I suppose journalists working on this that had experience in that area. I mean all these documents there it's not like you will have a look at the document and you really understand at first what at first glance what is in there. I think we only have 10 minutes left so I actually want to give everyone in the audience the chance to to ask question that will be handheld microphones. I mean if you don't have a question I would have some more questions but I assume that's one back there. Thank you. Thank you very much. From the UK you guys managed to force our Prime Minister and the Chancellor to publish their tax returns but they didn't publish them all they just published a summary of their tax returns. So thank you. And I understand what you said about you cannot release WikiLeaks style and I understand people will be doing their best to track down the source. When is the next release of information because in the UK what happened was this hit the press really hard suddenly everyone is telling you about their tax returns. We find that certain members of political parties have resigned certain members of political parties have used tax havens. So then what happened was there was a media cover thing around the opposition party being anti Semitic and then that wiped it all out of the headlines. I'd like this to come back. So when would you be releasing your next data. Is it is it coordinated or is it just going to happen by bits and pieces or what. At the moment nearly all project partners are still working on the material and of course we speak about what we found and we share our findings and in some cases we decide if some of the media partners want to go on the same day. But there's no rule for that at the moment so everybody can go for it. If the Guardian finds something in the data we would expect them to share with all the other partners that are findings but there is no rule that they have to stick to a certain publication date because this first date of publication that was the third of April was only important for us to prevent all of the partners to get into a certain race of scoops because we wanted to work in a big group and not without the fear that one of the partners may go may publish first so we are that's the reason why we agreed on a on a date to go out together to prevent this run. But I can if I I know for example from the Guardian that they are working on many stories that suit that you're starting we are also working on dozens of stories at the moment that are based on the Panama Papers. And there will be articles published in the next days and weeks but there's no fixed date where we can say OK on July the first that will this be out. There's nothing like that. That's a question over here. Hi. I would like to ask Granata actually what would you say should be the role of mainstream journalism so to say because for sure you need mainstream media to report about these issues but then you always have this problem that was pretty obvious here. The journalists of course like to kind of protect their profession so they will never publish everything because then their job would be kind of superfluous. But what like what would you imagine what could be the the ideal role of John Liss and yeah I mean I mean not being a journalist myself. What I can see is I mean I see a superior value value and it is a value of the right to know of the people. And that is the value that that's the fundamental value that together with the freedom of the press should be exercised. We are seeing with this release for example 99 percent even more than 99 percent of the information that will never. Will never be published somehow. It's unclear. There's no warranties that this information will be published. So the role of then and some of the countries there will be there's not not even not even a partner if I think of my country Guatemala. We might never hear about this. And so it is it is a balance. You know it is protecting the source exclusivity of the news outlets the economy the economy of the news and the really flawed model on how journalism gets gets funded. And at the same time they write to know of the people globally you know on on a truth that only 400 journalists have access to and that they can decide with a bias and a specific agenda what to do with them. I think that the role of the media more and more will will radically change in the near future because it is not exempted from the institutional crisis that all our current institutions are facing. And I think that the role of the mainstream media right now is to examine itself reinvent itself and and and challenge the limits not. Impose themselves even more constraints that the constraints that they already have and be supportive of each other instead of. Yeah. Instead of embracing the culture of secrecy that is what we are fighting against. I wanted to ask you another question actually Frederick when when we look at the the sentiment of criticism against media and against. I mean interestingly enough the release of the Panama Papers comes at a time where there's a lack of trust into media organizations or Dwyane Link Trust that's most prominently associated with this kind of horrible term. Lügenpresse in Deutschland in Germany and also there's the funding crisis which is another thing and would you say the way that the ICIJ and your organization approach this leak was actually trying to trying to combat that and putting it on different shoulders and stuff. How do you see the role of investigative journalism actually in the debate around Dwyane Link Trust in media organizations. I mean we learned in the last years that it's being more and more important to explain what we do. For example, I mean we already tried for us. It was little steps what we've done now and have done Facebook live sessions, Reddit sessions. We wrote hundreds of emails to readers explaining stuff going to a conference like this. And I think for example if I think about Reddit we wouldn't have done that two years ago. But it was important to explain our work and to explain our readers why we have chosen for example not to publish everything and why this protection of the sources is so important for us. And at the same time we can learn of this discussion. For example one lesson we learned is that in these days we are trying to publish more data on the stories we already released. It's like we already did it, published documents regarding these stories. But we will do more on that. But it takes some time and for us it wasn't the same time we had to explain our readers that we think that it's very important to address their questions. But at the same time it's also important that we can go on with our work. It's like digging into something. So that's something where we had to find the balance. I don't know if we have found it. But I do understand readers that want to answer us. But we also have to ask them for some time. And we will try to answer as much questions as possible. But at the same time we want to do our work. And the work is at the first hand investigative journalism. So that's a way of finding the balance. Obviously it's very important to address questions like that and rebuilding the trust in conventional media. I think we have time for one last question. And whoever that person is I would just ask you politely to be really brief. Because we're running out of time and there's more great panels. Very short. When we look at what I want to go on the lessons learned that means there is a structural corruption. When I look at Germany I can't get the information of the companies who owned by who. That means I have to pay I think three euro or four euro to get this company registrations. When I look to other countries I don't get the information at all. In the UK there is open corporates but I look at the tax havens. This information I think it's not available. I think we should learn the lesson to publish all this information. And for example there are so many companies in UK who are houses who are bought by foreign countries. Other countries too. So I should just say it's not possible that a corporation in Panama can buy a house in UK. What's about this lesson we have to learn. I mean from a German perspective regarding such data there's been leaked to us. We have a certain restriction that we cannot publish everything because there are restrictions due to the German presser. So we are only allowed to publish things that are of public interest and stuff like that. But what the ICIJ is doing next week is they actually are going to release a database with the kind of metadata of the Panama Papers. And that is for example information that can be found in some countries in the company registry but in some countries not. So there is this first step of building up a database without losing the possibility to protect the source. Because it will be the metadata and I think it's important because it will be an important tool for investigators, for NGOs, for lawyers. But still we couldn't do it from due to German law but ICIJ is doing it and I personally think it's a good idea. But they also will not be able to release the original documents because there again we are at the point of protection of the source. And I hope that, I mean for us, we do that, I mean for me it's like too hard speaking in my body because I do understand that people would like to see all the original documents. But for me it would be personally, it would be a catastrophe if we release something that may lead to the exposure of the source and in the worst case even to some harm to the source. So for me it's hard but for me the life of the source is more important. For me it's really, really hard to trust 400 media outlets having access to these kind of documents and then claim that what you are trying to do is to protect the source. I mean it is hard to believe, it is hard to believe that it will be a perfect circle of trust of 400 journalists working on this. It's really hard because I have experienced the flood, even unintentionally, even small negligence, one mistake, you know. So I do not take that argument of source protection but regardless I think that one of the very important tools that journalists need is open data. That's key and that's a fight that citizens can help to and pushing for the release of that key data that should be public and that should be free. I mean journalists in Guatemala were trying to access the corporate databases. It was so expensive that the limited budget that they already have for the few little investigative journalism that takes place there, they couldn't afford. I mean it is unacceptable that journalists have to pay for information that should be in the public domain. We need more information, we need more data that we can cross reference and I think that is one important lesson. And the second important lesson we need, as I said again, support courage foundation and invite the creation of similar foundations everywhere to protect sources. Thank you Renata, thank you Frederic, thank you everyone for being here. Unfortunately we have to finish the discussion now as the next panel is coming up but I guess from what I understand there will be more publications, there will be more debates around that. You can see our Twitter handles there, tweet at us, we can debate on Twitter, we can debate here at Republica and yeah, thank you for being here. Thanks to both of you. Thank you.
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The Panama Papers not only shed light onto a secretive system of tax havens and hidden money, but also sparked a debate about how a leak of this size and scope should be reported on. Even before a public relations crisis broke out for politicians using the services of Mossack Fonseca, strong sentiments of scepticism and criticism emerged about the work of the ICIJ and publishing outlets. Could the treatment of the data be biased? Why was Putin featured prominently in the documents while US politicians were absent? Should the 2,7 Terabyte even be published altogether? In the age of digital media, where every user is also broadcaster, the means of publication themselves quickly turn into a topic of hot debate. Which practical ethics should whistleblowing and journalism apply today to ensure that the public is served and informed best? How should investigative reporters react to the feedback of its readers? And how can we make sure a leak’s revelations don’t get lost along the way?
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10.5446/20686 (DOI)
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Music Hello everybody, thank you very much for having me here at Republica. I hope you're all having an amazing time, I certainly am. I'm here today to talk to you about art and war. Before I begin my talk, I want to kind of gauge your opinion about something. I'm going to show you some pictures on the screen behind me, and I want you to raise your hand if you think that these pictures show a basic human need. Okay, so this is the first picture. This is humanitarian aid in the form of food. So how many people here think that food is a basic need for humanity? Okay, there's one person that doesn't there, I don't know how they're still alive. Okay, the next picture is a picture that displays shelter. So how many people here think that shelter is essential, a basic need for humanity? Again, the same person not raising their hand there, I don't know where they live. And another picture here, and this picture for me illustrates water. How many people here think that water is a basic need? Okay, the final picture that I'd like you to tell me, whether you think this is a basic need, is this is a picture of young children, okay, two people already, young people dancing, and this for me represents art and creativity. How many people here think that this is a basic need, along with the things I just talked about? Okay, so that's quite an interesting response. I didn't expect quite as many people to raise their hands. Well, for me, art and creativity is absolutely a basic need, and this presents quite a lot of challenges for me in the work that I do. I get asked this question a lot, why art? Why art, not aid? And this is usually followed by, without aid, people will die. And my first response to this is, well, why do I have to choose? We don't choose between food and water, but why do I have to choose between art and the other things that I talked about? This question came about when I was speaking to a big charity in the UK who were shipping out aid to war zones, and I asked them whether they would be able to take some music equipment so that we could make a music studio in a war zone, and they basically laughed me out of the room, and they said, this is ridiculous, you know, people will die if we don't take this aid. And this was a long time ago, and I thought, okay, maybe they've got a point, maybe I'm naive, maybe music doesn't have the power that I think it does. So I carried on working in the field of conflict across the world, and I really discovered that music, creativity, theatre, culture is essential to life. And so I want to show you that today, and see if I can convince people here of that as well. I kind of want to start with this quote, and it says, but if culture was a luxury, then why suffer for it? If it were trivial, then why prosecute it? And if it was harmless, then why die for it? And this is a quote from a prince in the Netherlands who's connected to something called the Prince Klaus Foundation. And for me, this kind of provides a good context for the talk today. First of all, if culture and creativity wasn't so powerful, then why would the first people to be taken and tortured under a dictatorship be the artists? This is a photograph of a friend of mine, Ramiya Sam, who was a singer in the Egyptian Revolution, so he was a singer in Taria Square. And shortly after the Revolution, he was taken and tortured in the Egyptian Museum by the military. And for me, this is one man and a guitar. So why is his music so powerful that it warrants the military to go and to torture him? To give you a bit of context and a little bit about me, I'm not necessarily from a war zone, I'm from this place. This is a place called Burnley, which is just next to Manchester in the UK. It's a very small town where people don't generally leave, people don't look outwards to the world for inspiration. So I never really thought that I would have the opportunity to leave Burnley. But then music came into my life, and for me, on my own personal journey, music's been really important in taking me out of a place that I probably wouldn't have left without it. When I was 10 years old, my parents bought me a guitar, which I didn't really want, but I learned to play it, and that took my life in this completely different direction. I learned to play guitar, I was in bands, I started a record label, and I made music events all across the world, and that helped me to get this understanding of how important music can be in transforming people's lives. And so for me, if nothing else, creativity will take people on a journey. I don't know what that journey is or where it ends, but it will definitely do that. For me, creativity is important because it can be made anywhere and by anybody. The great thing about art is that you don't need a lot of resource to make it happen. This is a photograph of theatre in the Congo. Theatre, you just need your body, if you're making hip-hop, you just need your voice. So for me, it can be made anywhere. And the most important art, the art that I enjoy the most, is made by the people who need to make it. It's urgent. I'm the co-director of an organisation called In Place of War, and we work with creativity in places of conflict across the world, and we've been doing this for the past 12 years or so. We work with education, we work with the creation of spaces and the mobility of artists in war zones. And we've been doing this in about 40 countries across the world. Our work started with one question, and that was, do people make art when bombs are dropping on their heads? And we started by exploring theatre in places of conflict and asking, first of all, does theatre happen? And if it does, then why are people making theatre and how are people making theatre? And to cut a long story short, this took many years, and we found that in every time of conflict, post-conflict, and peace, people are making theatre. That theatre may change and may look different at different times of conflict, but it's always being produced. So this kind of threw a question at me, which was, why is art so important that at the most challenging times in people's lives, are they still making it? Do they still feel they have to make it? So I want to show you a few examples of different artistic practice that I've seen across the world that for me, manages to do something that without art wouldn't exist. The first place that I want to show you is Zimbabwe. Okay, so this is a satirical news programme called the Zambaisy News, and these guys are actually in Berlin right now, and they're performing on Wednesday, I think. You should check it out. Zambaisy News is amazing because what they do with satire is quite incredible. When I went to Zimbabwe for the first time, I tried to have a conversation in a local bar with my friends about politics, and it just was a no-go. It was absolutely not spoken about. People felt scared that they might be taken and tortured, and all these things are very much a reality in Zimbabwe. What Zambaisy News does is satirise the government through their news programme. In a place where you can't speak about politics in a bar, they produce their news programme on DVDs and distribute them across the townships and stream their programme online, and they reach 9 million people in Zimbabwe with this programme. Now, for people from Europe, this might seem quite normal to produce this kind of programme, but believe me, it's completely unique. And for me, through satire, it opens up a space in Zimbabwe where people can question the government. They can question what's happening, they can provocate, they can satirise. So for me, this is really, really powerful. These guys also create a festival called Shoko Festival, and again, they have a festival here of hip-hop and spoken word, in a place where you can't talk about politics in a bar, but you can stand on stage and you can be politicised through hip-hop and spoken word. Last year, I went to see their festival where Zambaisy News performed, and their festival site was in front of the Zanu PF, this is Mugabe's party, in front of their building in the centre of Harare. And Zambaisy News performed, and for me, it was one of the most political apps that I've ever seen. Thousands of people were there watching comedians satirise Robert Mugabe. Nobody got arrested. And this, for me, is a very unique thing, so it shows the power of satire in this space. Talking about space, which I think is really important in terms of making transformation within communities, this is a space called Afroregue, and it's based in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Afroregue started out as a community newspaper, in a place that is very challenging in terms of gang-related violence, and pretty much was a no-go area. This community newspaper evolved into a multifaceted creative space where young people can go in and learn drama, learn dance, learn how to produce music. And this space engages people in positive activity that they otherwise would not be able to be involved in. Again, this is another space that I really love. This is called Tuna El Fuerte, and this is based in Caracas in Venezuela, in a very dangerous ghetto. Tuna El Fuerte is a creative space that's made out of converted shipping containers. Every week, 500 young people access this space and come out of the violence that surrounds them and engage in creative activity. So without a space like this, there would be no other option for young people in this neighborhood. Again, sticking with Venezuela, this is a photograph of an orchestra called El Sistema. El Sistema is an orchestra where young people can engage and learn classical instruments across the country. When I visited Venezuela, one of the most surprising kind of consequences of this orchestra manifested itself when I talked to a young boy, and he's a percussionist in the orchestra, and I went to his house and he was playing his percussion, and he was amazing. And he said to me, every day I have to travel from school to the orchestral rehearsal, and I travel across the ghetto of favela, and it's very, very dangerous for me. Every day I risk my life to do this, but as soon as I sit down and as soon as I play my percussion, I escape. It takes me out of the reality of my everyday life, and for him, his percussion was everything to him. It gave him this alternative to the reality, to the dangerous and challenging reality that he lives in. This is another space, this is in Sri Lanka in a place called Batikaloa, and this is called the Butterfly Peace Garden. And this was set up during the time of civil unrest in Sri Lanka. This space is a walled garden, and within it young people can just be young people, and they can be creative and they can make art. And outside the kind of walls of this garden, people were literally killing each other. There was a full blown war happening, but this was a safe space where children could go, and again, escape and create. Talking about kind of other aspects of how art can be powerful, this is a guy called Smokey, and he's from Bukinu Faso. Smokey is a hip-hop artist. Through Smokey's music, he recorded an album that again, questioned the government. The album, the intention was all about a better Bukinu Faso. His album was quite political and very strong, and it galvanized young people and brought them onto the streets, so that they themselves could be political and revolt against the government. Because of the power of his album, the government bombed his studio, and he had to exile the country. And again, when we think about art as being maybe this kind of soft thing that people do for entertainment, this was a very real thing that the government felt threatened by. So for me, this is very powerful. And again, talking about Rami Asam, the guy I talked about before, he was performing in Taria Square when the government were overthrown. And the great thing about what Rami did was he kept people in a situation where they might have been protesting for days, for weeks, or some people even lived in Taria Square for many months. And his music galvanized people and kept them there and kept them motivated for this time. This is a photograph from one of my favorite cities in the world. This is a photograph from Medellin in Colombia. And Medellin, many of you may know, has been troubled for decades from narco-related violence. It's the city where Pablo Escobar is from and was very, until very recently, the major producer and distributor of the drug cocaine. Young people in the city of Medellin had very restricted options in their life. Most young people from the poorer neighborhoods would be intra-cartels. And the life expectancy of young people in Medellin was 21 years old. Between the years of 1987 and 2000, 40,000 young boys were murdered in the city of Medellin. In Medellin, the young people decided they wanted to create an alternative to this one option, this one choice that they had, which was to go into a drug cartel. So they started a hip-hop movement. They were inspired by hip-hop in New York in the 1980s and bands like Public Enemy. And they started out with them getting cardboard boxes, practicing break-dancing moves, and then people started to rap across the city. The consequences of this were huge in terms of positive impact. Today, there are 2,500 hip-hop acts in the city. And when I went there the first time, this is the thing that changed my mind about how important art can be. This quote, this is a hip-hop emcee called Lupe, and he said, if it wasn't for hip-hop, I would be dead. Hip-hop gave me another option in life, and for that, I'm truly thankful. So that's someone saying that without being able to make hip-hop, they would literally have died. Hip-hop has become so important in the city of Medellin that there are now hip-hop schools in every single commune or neighbourhood across the city, where people engage and learn all the five forms of hip-hop. So art has all of these different purposes, but one of the things that I've seen, having visited lots of war zones and lots of places that suffer from conflict, is the role of women is often really marginalised in these contexts. Women often fulfil really traditional roles, but I'm seeing art playing a role in terms of empowerment of women across some of the places that we work. This is an artist called Awa, African Woman Arise, and again she's from Zimbabwe from a township called Makokobe. In her township, not only are women very marginalised, but they suffer from things like domestic violence, rape and so on. And these things are not talked about, they kind of happen under the surface. Awa is 22 years old and she's the first female hip-hop artist from this city, and through her music she speaks out against these injustices in her township, and this is really powerful, she's an amazing performer. But for me it does two things. The first thing is it shows that women can have a different option from fulfilling the traditional role that is expected of them. And secondly, it brings to the surface the issues that women face in the township. One of my final examples of kind of the power of art is one of my favourite projects across the world that I've seen. This is a picture in Gulu in Uganda, so a place that's suffered from conflict. It's one of the kind of most challenging places that I've seen. This is an organisation that calls themselves a hip-hop agribusiness. So this is 15 hip-hop artists, and they have a farm, and they produce food on the farm, and they sell this, and the profit they make from the production of the food enables them to go into prisons in Gulu and deliver hip-hop workshops with prisoners. Through their work, the prisoners that they work with generally don't re-offend. And for me this is the power of hip-hop in a way to transform opportunities for those people who've fallen themselves in prison. And for me is an incredible example of a true social enterprise. The last thing that I wanted to talk about, and I could talk forever about a million different examples, but one of the most powerful things that I've seen in my lifetime is the way in which digital technology has grown and changed. But for me the power that it has with grassroots communities across the world. This is a photograph of an organisation called Media Ninja, who are based in Brazil. They kind of established themselves very much by accident during the uprisings that started a few years ago in Brazil. One guy just started documenting what was happening on his mobile phone. He got arrested and this became viral across Brazil. They're now a media platform that documents everything that's happening on the ground and they have this huge audience across Brazil. And what's really powerful about the creative way that they use digital technology is that they're able to tell an alternative narrative to that of the mainstream media. And for me this is so powerful. So they're able to document and tell the stories of the realities of what's happening on the ground, which often gets not mentioned in mainstream media. So there's some examples that I've encountered across the world through the work that we do within place of war. And again I could talk about many more. For me, art has this incredible capacity to give people hope and it fulfils lots of different roles. It can be political, it can be escape, it can be lots of different things. But everywhere we go we see it happening and being made. And I think when people have hope, people can then start to make change. This is a photograph for me that might define what we think a war zone or a battlefield looks like. But I think right now at this time we are seeing one of the most fundamental changes in our lifetimes happening right now. For me this idea of a battlefield is changing. This is a picture of soldiers in a desert, probably fighting other soldiers in a desert, where the rules maybe are slightly clearer than they are when now we have soldiers in our airport, soldiers on our streets, soldiers in our parks, in cities right across the world. For me the biggest change that we're seeing in our time is the changing nature of what a war zone looks like. I feel like war impacts upon every single one of us and I feel like sometimes we're soldiers but we don't have weapons. Things changed fundamentally in September 11th 2009 when people flew planes into buildings. And this continues to change today when we have people making explosions across cities in our world. The consequences of war can be felt every single day with people fleeing from conflict and arriving in different countries trying to find a better life. And often when they arrive somewhere else they're just faced with a completely different conflict. For me art is a way for us to counter the violence in the world and it's a way for us to show solidarity for the one thing that we all have in common. Regardless of our religion, regardless of our race, regardless of our gender, art is a way for us to show solidarity for humanity and this is really important. For people here who've come to watch this talk I hope that if you didn't believe that art was important, I hope I've gone a little way to showing you how important certainly I think it is. But I still don't think that that's enough. If every person in this room supported an artist in a war zone, if every person in this room helped to share the stories of the most isolated people to counter the narratives of the mainstream media, if every person in this room supported their refugee communities then this would be a start. We're living in a time of massive change and we need to be able to face our children and say that we all did something to help support those people who struggle because of the impact and consequences of conflict. I want to end with a quote and this is a quote of a friend of mine called Ewok and he's from Durban in South Africa. And he says this and I think that this for me summarises the power of art. He says, can poetry change the world? I said, can poetry change the world? Well, poetry can change a people and people can change the world. Thank you. APPLAUSE Thank you so much Ruth. Thank you. Wow, let's see. Hands going up for questions. We can take one or two maybe? I'd have a couple if you like. There are so many moving stories, so many personal impressions. How do you manage to take all those home and keep all the dynamic and going? I guess it's because of the people that we work with across the world. We're working with the most incredible young people who have all of this drive and all of this passion. We're working with the most brave people that I've ever encountered working in the most challenging context. For me, I'm always inspired by what I see. The work we do is how we can support those people and tell their stories on a more global platform. For me, the fire of the people we work with gives me the fire to take that forward. Quite often what we're seeing when we go out into the field is it can be very challenging and upsetting. There is that resilience in people who are creating all of this art that gives me the drive to give that a bigger platform. You're just going to keep doing this, which you should be doing, as they're like, are you planning future steps? We're just expanding what we're doing. Working across more and more countries, a lot of the stuff that we do around creative entrepreneurialism, around education, we're doing it in more and more different contexts across the world. I think for me, as much as we can support artists and creative people across the world, as much as there's a need for that, we will continue to do that. It's great. Thank you so, so much for being here. I hope you can hang out a little bit at the gig maker space. And then maybe for those of you who are too shy to ask your questions now, you can find us there during the course of the day tomorrow, maybe, at some points. And find out a little bit more about your work. Thanks so much for being here. Please give us another big round of applause, please.
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A talk that explores the real power of art at different times of conflict showcasing examples of grassroots artistic movements from across the globe from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa.
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10.5446/20688 (DOI)
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Good morning. Is this working? Yeah? Good morning. Anything? Good morning. Thank you. Let's see here. So, as Geraldine said, I started 12 years ago working in humanitarian posts, a disaster work. I spent about five years working within the more traditional system of this very top-down, how are we going to go in and help people do things for them, build the houses that they need, the medical systems that they need, things like this. And after five years of doing that, I got pretty jaded with the way the current system works. A lot of people say now, like, oh, wow, you're innovating within the humanitarian system, which seems really big, but if you really step back and look at the humanitarian system, it's actually quite an archaic system. So, well, that's a nice compliment to say that we're innovating the humanitarian system. It doesn't take a genius, really. So, basically, after those five years, we've been working on a model, and there was a lot of drinks with other humanitarians after work, sitting back looking at the system, collecting all these different ideas. And then the earthquake in Haiti happened, and we said, okay, if there was a time to try some of these new ways of doing things, this was the time. Haiti is notoriously known as one of the most difficult countries in the world to operate without a disaster, and then there was a disaster. We started this little group called Communitaire. It stands for it's not French, sounds like it, but it has a lot to do with community. It stands for Communities United in Response, Relief and Renewal. And it was just very inspired by what you saw, what I saw a lot of times from within the local communities, and how they responded to a disaster, and how they really came together, put things aside, economic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, political views, things like this, put all this stuff aside and started to really work together. So I want to talk to you about two things today. One is about a lot of these technologies that we're seeing out in the maker space, in the maker movement, this additive manufacturing, CNC, things like that, and give you some really solid examples of how we are using them in the field. But the first thing that I want to talk about is this difference between a participant and a beneficiary. The humanitarian system very much looks at the people affected by a disaster as beneficiaries. How are they going to go in and help them? How are they going to benefit from their organization, things like this? And then you have a participant, which is very much so if you look at the maker movement, it's a very do-it-yourself, you know, people are doing things for themselves. There's a lot more pride and dignity in doing something for yourself, and it's something that had always bothered me within the humanitarian work that we were doing, is how can you do something for someone without requiring some sort of exchange and dignity during that process? So I'm going to use an example that we might all know be able to easier relate to. And this photo here is Post Bonnaroo, which is a large music festival. I'm sure most of us have been to music festivals and things like this. This is Post Bonnaroo, and this is how it's left. This is what I would equate to being the beneficiaries when people come in, do large-scale production in order for the people going to the show, essentially, the beneficiaries. This one over here is this other little festival called Burning Man, which I've been a part of for a lot of years. This is a festival that's put on by the participants. Burning Man provides very little, provides a stage and a platform and a means for people to create their own event. And this is how it's left. This is how it's left after Bonnaroo. This photo here actually was used by Burning Man as a public shaming for one of the biggest messes they've left seeing after Burning Man. So it's not jaded at all. It's just that's actually the worst one they've published. And this is typical after just about every music festival, things like this. So if you think about that, and how when Humanitarian Aid is just simply put on for the beneficiary or the attendee, versus the attendees putting on the show themselves. And this also relates a lot to a lot of the technologies that we're now using that enable people to do things for themselves. So like I was saying, you see a lot of this amazing things, you know, how the community operates in a post-disaster zone. Six years ago, we did not know what a maker space was. We didn't know about this maker movement happening. This was a lot of years coming completely from the opposite side of the humanitarian sector where we developed this model and launched it in Haiti. We said, what if we just got a big workshop, a lot of tools, technology, things where the victims of a disaster could utilize this space to help themselves do things for themselves. Well, about a year into we had a fire in our workshop there. We had a large workshop tool-lending library, things like this. And this was our workshop, our original workshop. It caught fire. We had a whole bunch of people in there using it. It was a freak accident. We're situated in Haiti very just outside the slums of City Soleil, which are the poorest slums in the Western Hemisphere. The UN in the 90s deemed it the most dangerous place on earth. There are lots of violence, things like this. And rather than going in and kind of injecting ourselves into this community to see how we could help them, we set up just outside this community and invited them to come in and to do things for themselves, use our workshop. Well, when this fire happened, the community had been using it for about a year. That community in Haitian Creole, there's a word called Combeet, and it's a very, very old, like you guys were talking about, it's a very, very old principle of people coming together and harvesting each other's crops. It comes from the peasant movement. And so these slums of City Soleil actually called a Combeet. It's the first time anybody had ever heard of Haitians calling a Combeet for an international organization. They were invested in this space. This was something that they could use. So they came in and rebuilt it. And I'm going to show you our new workshop here via one of these cool technologies you may have seen outside called Virtual Reality. So here's our new workshop. This is used by, let's see, in this whole center. This is kind of the makerspace. We have another 3D printing and computer lab, things like that, where some of the techier stuff happens. This has been used by hundreds of different organizations. In Haiti alone, we call the overall space a resource center. So it's a makerspace, co-working space, a lot of these buzzwords that we're using today, but still shared space full of resources, a resource center. So this, the Virtual Reality, we've started to do a bit of this to give people context. I know UNHCR is using Virtual Reality in Syrian refugee camps in order to build empathy and have people understand what's going on. We use it for a lot of different reasons. Here's our workshop. Like I said, last year alone, we had 185 different organizations come and use this space. We really focus a lot on that cross-cultural communication and collaboration. So we had about 60% Haitian groups using this space and about 40% international groups. So with this also, we have tons of different groups that want to come in with their new technology, new ideas. We encourage them to incubate it in a space that isn't directly in the community first, but it's just outside the community, but has a lot of that community feedback. Now, this is great when I can send this to groups that are coming in, they're being like, okay, what kind of tools, what kind of workshop are we working with, what do we need to bring, we can easily just send them this and say, okay, well, here, go ahead, take a look yourself, you can see what you're working with, you can see what tools we have, and it really gives them a great idea of what this space is like. Back to my slideshow here. Now, as far as some of these technologies that we've been using and really providing, giving these tools and making them available to the beneficiaries or not to the participants, really, and how it is that they can use them, so we're in Haiti, Philippines, and we've been in Nepal for the last year. One of the coolest stories, and actually like a shout out to Field Ready who helped us in the early days, 3D print these shipping containers, the UN gave us, these are little model 3D printed shipping containers, because what we want to do is we really want to incorporate the community in the design of the spaces that we're doing. So it's very hard when it comes to designing physical space, you know, that you're kind of becoming exclusive and that you have to be an architect or somebody that can draft and things like this. So we had this great idea, the UN gave us 16 shipping containers to build our space with, we asked Field Ready, can you 3D print 16 shipping containers that are to scale, and how can we really engage the community in building out our space and designing our space. This is kind of where, once you give a lot of these tools and technology to the people there for, is where you start to get innovation that you couldn't really come up with on your own. This is very bottom up innovation. So this gentleman here, we wanted to make the space very inclusive. He is the CEO of the Disabled Peoples of Nepal Association, and you might be able to see his staff there between his legs, his cane, he's blind. And so he had kind of heard about this 3D printing but had never really understood it, and we invited them over people, you know, with wheelchair blind people with all sorts of disabilities, to give us feedback on what this design of the center ultimately would be their center would look like. And so he understood it, he came up, you know, told us a lot about how to incorporate, you know, blind person's perspective and all this sort of stuff. But then he realized in understanding what this 3D printing was capable of doing, and he asked us a simple question. He's like, wait a minute, can you guys, once you guys are done building this space, can you scan it and can you 3D print a tactile map of the entire space with Braille, so that any blind person can come in and navigate it and understand it. That's absolutely brilliant, I've never seen that, that's something that we would have never, you know, our technicians or 3D printers, people would have never really come up with. This is where these innovation and ideas are coming, you know, you provide the technology, they'll come up with it. So here's what we're currently constructing in Kathmandu right now. It's a maker space, co-working space, workshop, tool lending library, it's been a very collaborative design. Something we really like, you know, like creating the spaces, as soon as you step into them, you're automatically thinking outside the box. Some other examples of 3D printing are, there's tons, I'm just giving you guys a handful of different technologies and some solid examples, was in the Philippines we were asked by UNICEF, there was a large problem with sexually transmitted diseases, and that's because, you know, it's a very Catholic country and a lot of this is very taboo, so they wanted to build a reproductive health clinic. But how do you build a reproductive health clinic and make that appealing and actually used by a lot of these street kids and homeless kids that are in the street and things like this? So we designed, we worked with the community, we worked with over 100 different street youth, and the city and a bunch of different organizations, the World Health Organization, and it's a very collaborative design of what is now the Tacloban City Youth Center, and this is a, this is kind of cool, this is a shipping container, reproductive health clinic, skate park, adolescent training, and basketball court, all into one. So you don't have this kind of sterile reproductive health clinic all by itself, you've got this community engaged, but what was really cool was after the completion of this project, it was completely owned by the community. It was, and a lot of international aid comes in, builds something, gets it all up and going, leaves come back a year later and is like, wait a minute, why isn't this getting used, why hasn't it been maintained, anything like this? And you really have to start from the beginning and get that, we call it design equity. Design equity, sweat equity, and decision making equity are three different equities that you can get from the community when you're doing projects with them. So this was a cool example, and if you see the little guy right here, we were able to work with the youth for them to design their own space, and before you go right into large scale production, you can 3D print things. And so the kids would come up with a bunch of different ideas, and here's the layout of the skate park, here's where the clinic is, things like this, and we say, that looks really cool, what if we 3D print that first, and then you can have a working model, and there was a lot of iterations of this, you know, rapid prototyping, where they would print it all out and be like, oh, this won't work, you know, and then they go back to the drilling board, change it, change it, so it really was their design. Let's see here, another good example, as we're like, you know, we did the first 3D printing lab in Haiti, we're doing prosthetics, a lot of things like this. Nepal has been very, very encouraging, the maker movement is extremely strong there. People look at India and China as tech and innovation, all this sort of stuff, and they tend to forget about this little country that's directly in between them. So we brought in a simple 3D printer, we work with the robotics association in Nepal, yes, Nepal has a very strong robotics movement, they're having to build things on their own and figure things out, but there's a lot of this hunger for tech and innovation within the space. So, a lot of times we see these 3D printers getting used for knickknacks, you know, 3D printing another Yoda head, things like this, which is cool, it's a part of the do-it-yourself craft movement and things like that, but we're finding more and more in these developing countries where larger scale manufacturing is not readily available is where a lot of these printers are getting really, really used. This was within the first two weeks of providing the robotics association in Nepal, a 3D printer, they printed one knickknack, they then started printing chocolate molds for a company that wanted to do very specific ones. The third print they ever did was for an implant of a girl that had brain cancer, not brain cancer, sorry, bone cancer, and the doctors found out about this publicly available 3D printer, they came right in, they started working with all the teams, they scanned her left foot piece that didn't have cancer, 3D printed a model for the other foot to use that as a metal mold to then do this implant and this girl is now like fast on the road to recovery. This is within two weeks of providing this technology. You know, a lot of people sit with 3D printers on their desk for a large amount of time, these guys are just really, really hungry for it and going for it. Some of the other cool technologies you guys might have seen, the CNC machine out there, computer numeric control, what's really cool with these machines is that you don't have to be on the ground to help design and build these things. So this is, you know, we are at an internet conference, almost all of these machines work via the internet. So we're working with a Japanese group right now, a university that are designing a new type of house that is literally computer numeric control cut out via a router. So this is them, this is the Nepali guys cutting out the designs by the Japanese guys, where they sent one Japanese guy on the ground, but this house that we're building, here's the next photo of the house that they built in the Philippines in partnership with the FabLab network. It's just cool that we're like these different technologies can not always work. Internet. Hmm. Yeah. Anyway, this is kind of the new, you know, the old system is where people have to go be on the ground for six months at a time, get local contacts, things like this. Hey, there we go. Now we're growing out of that to our designers. Technology. Let's see here. So here's the house. This house is the one that they built in the Philippines. Same thing designed by a bunch of people in Japan assembled on the ground, all computer cutouts, really cool structure. It's not necessarily a solution when it comes to housing, but it's providing an alternative that gets people outside the box thinking and trying new things. We're currently, because you can't always get a lot of these tools and technologies in the countries that we're working in, sometimes you have to build them. And so this is what we're currently constructing in Nepal right now. It's an emplasma cutting CNC machine. So rather than cutting out wood, it'll cut out metal. And you can't, there isn't one in Nepal. You can't go down to your shop and buy it. I'm definitely jealous of the instance in China where they were like, here's $100,000, go buy a bunch of equipment. We're not always able to do that. So we're actually having to really hack these systems and figure out how it is that we can build this stuff using the local resources. This also makes it more scalable. People can take this, will work out the bugs and other people can replicate it elsewhere. And then just for fun, there's actually been doing a lot of work with drones and some of the technology that's coming out with that. So a lot of building assessment. This is actually how we'll be 3D printing the tactile map of our property via drone software that will go around, take thousands of photos, stitch it all together, and then create an online computer model. So here we're doing some assessments of getting structural measurements and all this sort of stuff of damaged buildings without actually having to even go in the building, which might not be that safe, especially after an earthquake when there's a lot of tremors afterwards. This humanitarian world is very, very just starting to know what needs to innovate. And it's not exactly sure what that looks like. There's definitely popping up here and there. But this whole maker movement, there's a little buzz, things like this, just do it yourself. What does this mean? So coming in September, we figured why not? I'm sure many of you have heard of Maker Faire. We're bringing Maker Faire to Nepal for the first time. And it's also going to be the world's first humanitarian focus to Maker Faire. So a lot of these Maker Faires are about creating this, creating craft, which is great. It's getting a lot of the Western world back into that act of making and doing things for yourself. But how are we really going to display to the UN, to the humanitarian systems, what is the possibility of this technology, and especially when you give this technology to the people that can really use it and scale it on their own. Back to how the aid industry is going to innovate. It's currently trying to innovate from within, but what it really needs to do is it needs to take a lot of these people, like the people that are in this room, that are very naturally innovators, that are very naturally thinking forward and invite them into the system. So there are some examples of where the aid system is trying to develop from within, and it's a very slow going process. Whereas you look around us, you know, from San Francisco, it's a hotbed of innovation. We're starting to create these pathways to where these people that very naturally innovate are coming in and influencing the more traditional aid system. I say this because this is basically an open call to get involved. There are a lot of people in this room, there's a lot of different ways to get involved, whether it's, you know, online design, where you're emailing one of our machines that are building something. There is, Andrew, what is it called, MakerNet? Yeah, it's an internet network that keeps people together for production. Absolutely, so it's like MakerNet, where you don't always have to go beyond the ground for six months, a year at a time. You can get involved in a lot of different ways. We are doing an open call for makers for the MakerFair, which means, you know, if you guys, a lot of makers have been kicking around little ideas that could potentially have humanitarian impact, this is a great example to not only go try it out on the ground, but also to get it in front of a lot of the major aid organizations that are based in Kathmandu. I think that's it. Is there questions? I think she wanted to ask those. Hi, Sam, thanks a lot for that. I missed half of it, but never mind. You were talking about a lot of these things work with the internet. My friend was here a couple of weeks ago, and I was asking him if he does online learning through universities, edX or something like that. He told me that he has issues in Kathmandu about the internet access, that it's so slow. How do you overcome those kind of problems? How we overcome is we pay a whole lot for high-speed internet. You look at internet as a shared resource. These are resource centers. I think we currently pay $400 for fiber optic internet, which is this technology leapfrogging that's happening in a lot of these countries. We were able to go straight to a high-speed fiber optic internet, but then really share that. That doesn't solve the entire city's problem, but it is coming faster and faster. You said before that you were provided with some sort of technological devices or stuff that you can use by the UN. What do you think that organizations like the UN or the EU could do to help you innovate the humanitarian aid system? In terms of what they should do more, what they should stop doing, what they should improve to help you? I think it's on the way. There is the World Humanitarian Summit in a couple weeks in Istanbul that is going to be looking at a lot of these different things. I think it is showing the support from communities like this and not having to have them stumble and discover it on themselves. Part of the Maker Faire too is getting it right out as if it's window shopping for them in some ways. The best way they can adapt is they have to know first what's going on. We're trying to do a lot of that proof of concepts. Proof of concepts is always really good. Large humanitarian systems and governments can't have a really hard time innovating because they have no room for failure. Smaller and more nimble groups, we call our spaces spaces of safe failure. We're trying to get these ideas and designs out so they can be adapted by larger organizations. Thanks for your awesome work and for the support you've given us at Field Ready over the years. The humanitarian system, which you're critiquing with this, I would agree with your analysis. It's very top down. I see it every day, has probably spent about a quarter of a billion dollars on trialing humanitarian innovation. As you've indicated, there are various degrees of success for that. The humanitarian response in Nepal was about, the pledged amount was about four billion US dollars, although there's different amounts quoted. I'm just wondering, would the character of what you're doing at Communitech change substantially if you had access, maybe not to a quarter of a billion US dollars, but maybe a couple of million of US dollars to really support what you're doing, or would the character of what you're doing change? If we were able to mobilize aid money or development money to support the making movement in Nepal and to try and build that bottom up approach, do you think that would change what you're doing, or do you think it would actually only enhance what you're doing? It's a really, really good question. I've been a part and I've seen a lot of smaller innovative non-profits start and get large funding a little bit too early. Giving an 18-year-old a Ferrari to a million dollars and being like, what's going to happen if you do this? We're just now starting to apply for institutional funding. This is six years on. We really feel like our identity has become strong enough as an organization, so where we can start to take on this funding, a lot of groups, it's called being funder driven. Before you know what the big risk in that is, you're constantly looking back at where the money is coming from instead of what the need is in front of you. That is a very serious concern. It's why we've taken six years doing this very painstakingly and have adopted much more of a business model. I've also seen a lot of organizations get half a million, a million dollars, and then two years later they're like, okay, we're out of money and amazing program stops. That's becoming very, if you ask me, the philanthropic dollar is the least sustainable thing on earth. You have to be really careful in how it is that you do scale and really do your due diligence. That brings up a model. A lot of people ask how have we been able to do this without large institutional funding? It comes back to that dignity part too. When people can pay a little bit of a something for a service or a product, there's a lot more dignity in that. They're not just getting a handout. We have a very sliding scale business model to where the UNICEF did pay us well in order to do the youth center in Tuck-Loban. That gets turned right around and allows the guy that wants to come in and build bunk beds for his kids to do it for next to nothing. We still always charge a little bit of something so that there's that value within the space. I think you're facing in Nepal also a lot of corruption. Sometimes I have the experience that the Nepali government also sees foreign help as an option to get rid of their task for schools, building schools, get the system running. How do you cope with this difficult task? So cooperators, the government, doing your own thing and how it's working for you? We always work with the government as much as possible as I believe that humanitarian systems should and do. You look at example, I think Nepal has actually managed the response there really well and that the UN's budget in Haiti is potentially more than the government's budget is. So you've got to be really careful where Haiti has become an now a dependent state because all of these people have gone in without any permission from the government and they've just come in and done things. Then you have some place like China where you have a very, very strict, you know, before you're going to go in and do any sort of project, it's got to be very government approved. And I think that Nepal has actually played that system really well as far as like being having control to where it's not dominated by the international response and it's still actually doing institutional strengthening within the government. It is frustrating sometimes to the humanitarian sector when you want to just come in and get something done and you've got to go through the government. But in the long term, that's really better. One of the things we're challenged with right now is that internationals can only be in Nepal for five months in a calendar year. So that's really forced us to be like, OK, how quickly are we going to be able to transition from mostly internationals leading the organization to Nepalese and that's already happening. Thank you guys.
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Disaster relief and the aid industry must innovate dramatically to keep pace with technology, human needs and the speed and internationalization of commerce. Because innovation must come from all players, grassroots organizations can influence the process by bringing their “bottom up” brand of innovation to the problem. By building dynamic, collaborative, on-the-ground spaces in places where the population is in greatest need, a space is created where big aid can serve local needs more effectively than ever before.
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10.5446/20689 (DOI)
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Welcome. Hi. So nice to have you all here. I'm very happy to talk to you about my projects and what I'm doing. So I'm Sarah. I'm from the Hamburg Bavaria Nerds Collective. And you might have seen me also at the media convention over there where we are doing a performance. So yesterday and today we did a performance called Disconnected. It's just short slots, but we are staying in VR with our pink one season together with Thorsten. So yesterday was also the screening of our first performance in January back at the Game Science Center in Berlin. So yeah, what we do. So as we are nerds, we are doing a website news blog. It started in 2013. So we were actually the first one and still the biggest representatives of VR for the German speaking community. So it's all German. So if you want to look something up there, pretty informative. We also talk about there like about events we're going to or projects we're starting like also mixed reality streaming things like that. And what we also do is some clients work for that. I got a very short video for you. That looks like this. So this was a this was a. I can be a buyer stuff. Buy a stuff is a German health company and we kind of visualize the skin so you can walk around the skin. You can also go under the skin, look around, see everything, get information. Yeah, that's something we do. So we are working a lot with the HTC Vive. We really love that room scale model. You do. We are also doing other things regarding very small local arcade projects. One is called the level and you can also get more information if you come to our booth at the disconnected booth. There are also two more people from VR nerds and can tell you about what's going on there. Yeah, another thing we are doing is that we got a showroom in VR nerds locally. So on two floors, we are showing off the latest VR hardware. We are testing software. You can just come by, check out things, book a slot like online on our website and then try out different things. So we got the HTC Vive there and we also got an Oculus Rift like the newest one, CV1 there and do a lot of testing with that. And through that idea, we also got to another project we are doing which is called Neobuy VR. It's a small platform. It's a word wide platform which is kind of a mixture between a Airbnb concept sharing economy but then also high quality VR experiences. So you can guess not everyone has the room to set up a wife at this home and maybe also not can afford to buy a wife and a computer but still doesn't want to stay on the cardboard or the give VR. So therefore, you can just go to the website and type in where you're based, where you want to try out VR. So there will show up different locations where you can do that, all with a price, all with like, there are also people who do it for free who just like to meet minds like people and yeah, get in touch with them. So share their experiences and yeah, that's actually pretty neat. So you can try out VR nearby so you don't have to travel like very far or something like that. Also a mobile version and yeah, that will come soon but you can also like inform yourself about that later. But I actually want to talk to you about and I guess that's why you're here is more like art in relation to VR. So what is my passion project is Lucid Trips. It's an experimental VR game and we do have a concept there. So we go there and say like art. Art is like super powerful. It's everywhere and it takes like dimensions that are super big. It fills whole rooms. So it's not like only on a 2D plane like as a painting or something but art is more than that. And art is like you can look like art, you can look like that on art and you can even see on that photo. So the girl who's sitting there, she looks at that painting and we are looking at the photo from that painting. And it's not the same but it's not too far away. So it's still like 2D and you can still see what she sees and you're not missing anything too important. But then there's something else happening. So we also got art that is bigger than that frame that comes out of there. That has three dimensions that really has something which you can miss when you're not right beside the art piece. So when I'm not standing there in that room and can walk like from left to right and look at it from all perspectives, I will definitely miss out something from that artwork. So then that's the idea. We got a medium right now which can make all that visible and can project things into a three dimensional space and you can still walk around it, move around it, somehow get to notice all perspectives of a thing. That's how the virtual reality art gallery arise to make that visible, to make all perspectives of three dimensional objects which can exist either in the real world or are already made in the virtual world but then you can also not see it like only on a 2D screen but from like all perspectives. So we do all that in Lucid Trips and just to give you a rough idea of what I'm talking about if you might not have tried it before, I will show you a quick video of that as well. So oops, oops. That was not supposed to happen. There you go. It's still really early alpha stage but you get an idea of what you're doing. So you have that character controller which makes you completely free to move around in that world. So you can kind of float and fly. You have your two arms and you do every interaction and movement through these two arms. So they are full physics based and you use them for every interaction. You also get some chat packs which make you fly and move around more easily. So you can find things, you can hide things and you can explore art. This is a very dream world planet so it's not like an art gallery as it might be obvious to make a room. For example, Mona Lisa is a VR experience where you get the museum where Mona Lisa is actually hanging in and you just walk through this regular museum which looks totally like the reality. We stepped away from that and said we want to do an art gallery but we want to live through art different. In a different way. We don't want to have it in a super wide room because that's anyway what's not really supporting the art. So it lets it stand free. That's super awesome. But it's not like giving some extra, extra content to that. So as I talked before, if you want to inform yourself for all the other VR projects we're doing, there's also one guy with the camera walking around. You can ask him later. He's also from VR nerds doing YouTube videos from the side I just introduced to you. Awesome. So now I got to find my presentation again and this is not happening. So the art gallery is called Everland and now I'm going to talk a bit about the artists which are exhibiting there because the choice of the artists was quite important for me. As you know VR is quite a new medium and people are somehow also conservative about it and think like okay yeah I got art. So which is like really a grounded medium which was there like for a really long time and now we got VR which is kind of fluffy and not that grabbable for everyone. So I tried to get like really well-known artists in there to make a point that this is really cool and that people can do it and that also more or less known artists will jump on a train and get in there. So that was my first selection and every one of them has his own reason to be there. And now I will give you quite a few overview why every one of them should really be there. So that's my first artist. He's Phil Harrell. He's from Munich and he's completely he has a very strong disability so he can only move one finger but he's doing 3D art with that finger and he's building shapes. He's building really pop arty shapes and he's really close to a lot of celebrities especially in the US because they love his style, they love his things he's doing and also the way he's doing it. And he said something which really touched my heart. So he said he wants to do these worlds and these paintings because the worlds he's creating are the worlds he wants to live in. And we're kind of also making our dream worlds become reality in Lucid Trips and that's what he should be able to actually. So we also thought about a movement for him with the mouse so that mouse movement so that he can really be in there and also check out his art. Yeah. Then there's another one, Gero. He was actually the first artist who came to us or who was working with us together. He's also Berlin based. He has also a super awesome philosophy that yeah art especially digital art is like really something special. His name for his art is called limbic nation which is a mixture between the limbic system and imagination so that it's really uncertain and that everything can be different like every little piece, every little thing should be different. He's working also a lot with glitch like with moving elements with very glitchy animations. Yeah. So that's how his art piece looks in Lucid Trips on the whateverland app on the mobile app. And I'll show you the things of the artists on the mobile app because for the PC version as I told you it's early alpha stage we're not having all of them in there. Gero did a kind of spaceship and when you fly into it then you activate it and they're going to be fishes which just like fly around the art piece and it's getting colorful. So if you yourself interact with that art piece and come to it and do something with it like fly to it then itself gets activated and is also like shining for you, moving for you. That's also a special one. He's very open to the technology. It's Roy Backmeier. He's creating wood sculptures covered with oil. That's real craft work and he did already scan one of his art pieces. So that's a 3D scan of the art piece and we also transferred it again to Lucid Trips and his philosophy is that every little thing in life you have to look at it from different perspectives otherwise you will never get the core of it or never get the real idea of it if you don't look at it from like every perspective you can. And that's why also when you fly to the art piece and you fly through it it starts to get colored and it starts to turn. So it's all turning then. So if you interact with it, flew through it, changed your perspective on it, it will change the perspective always like continuously. And yeah, that's how it looks there and it's also it's floating that what really supports the idea of having to see it or that you can see it from every perspective. So the art piece would actually only work in the real world if you hang it in the middle of a room and can walk around it and in the virtual world it's quite easy to position it. So then we also got another one. It's Dime. Maybe you know him. He's a graffiti artist and his works are already on two dimensions. They're looking three-dimensional because they got that really strong deepness which is kind of genius. And this guy also always had the urge to make his artworks visible in all three dimensions for real. That's why he built a kind of a mud sculpture because he really wanted to see, oh, how does that actually really look from behind? And that's why we could work together with him very perfectly because we just had a 3D modeling guy which made a model of this mud sculpture and so we could transfer it to the planet very easily. And you also, you got it like that and he wanted to unfold the eye point because he always has that really strong sign. His eye point is always like kind of a flower. And when you fly to that art piece, it unfolds its eye point. So it's animating. So as soon as you get close to it, really explore it, really see every letter of it. It also starts to move and get colors. So also adding additional dimensions or features to the art piece which might explain more than just to look at the normal tech. Yeah, we got another guy. He's awesome too. He does actually more paintings but he's starting completely dream world and powerful worlds. He's creating worlds which don't fit at all into reality but have totally surreal colors, totally surreal people in there. And what we did there is he has this bronze sculpture which is one is in a museum and the other one is in his backyard. And I just went to him and 3D scanned his model of the thing and he was like really happy about the idea because he was always like, he just said to me like, wow, that's super awesome. Can I actually write on that when I'm in VR? So he was totally curious about the idea and I was really happy that someone like, he's actually pretty well known in Germany, also international but he's totally open for these ideas. So I was really happy about that. Yeah, so his artwork looks like that and the kind of intention or quest behind his thing is it's called Nahut. It's the one which comes after the war. So when the war is over, when all the army hairs went through, then there's the Nahut and after the Nahut everything is getting enlightened again and getting green again and yeah, going to live again when they pass through. And that's why you had to collect different lights. So you went to the front in front of him and if you collected that light which you can see right now, there's popping up another light like in the back and then there's popping up another light so you should really turn around him and then he's enlightened again and you can fully see how that sculpture looks. So there's also another layer added to the message of this sculpture. Yeah, that's how the whole planet looks at the moment. That's the cardboard planet so it's not like the real, really big planet for the HTC Vive. So as I told you before, we're actually developing Lucid Trips for the PC version for the HTC Vive which is much more, which can handle all the processing power. So it needs a lot of processing power to do VR and that's the mobile version which is a bit reduced because on a mobile it's clear you can't run that big things. Well, actually that was already it for most of it but I would totally be happy to answer any questions you got and to get into a conversation with you because I guess you might be curious about other things regarding VR or how we did that connection. Or is it already time? It's okay. Okay. Thank you. So if there are questions, there's a microphone, please take up your arms and then you can speak. Awesome. Are there any questions? Would you like to talk with her in private? The first one. Great. Please speak into the microphone. Yes, it's on right now. I was wondering the art you're showing right now in the app, it's analog art I think mostly converted into the VR spaces, right? I was wondering are you planning on making truly virtual art? And also in the second addition to that question, can you perform as a person inside the app as well with your arms and stuff? So first question, some of the creations, for example, the Gero Dolls creation which I just showed, it's completely digitally created but not in VR already. But we got a creation tool in Lucid Trips which gives you the possibility to click triangles to make different shapes, also quite complex shapes, but it's still low pulley shapes. So you can still only click triangles but that's coming. And another thing which I totally forgot to tell you, we got actually a pretty neat feature still in there. So all the art pieces, when you explore the riddles around it, like for example setting it free, making it colorful, you also have the opportunity to 3D print that. So you can actually 3D print these art pieces. So I don't got the 3D prints with me right now but there's the possibility to have for example the statue or also the wooden piece already, we printed them already. So it's not everything ready. For example, the tag from Dime, we are still working on that. So we are actually in the middle of the process from like setting these things up. But we also already got some examples which we also show off in Hamburg in our showroom but that's kind of this connection from the real world to the virtual world and then you take it back from your trip in the virtual world to the real world again. So I'm getting this kind of circle. Yeah. Hi. I love the game and the app. It seems like a good idea. One of the things I find about art to be true throughout all mediums is the call to emotion. And I'm wondering how you translate emotion into VR and are there techniques to do that and what emotions are you trying to convey? Emotions. So actually our game is about to let people free to put them in that world, in that avatar, in that another consciousness actually which only has these two arms in a low gravity situation and let it just become what you want to. So you can experience everything which is in there. We kind of want to trigger positive emotions with showing them like all that glowy glittery stuff giving them a lot of feedback of moving around in the world. So as soon as you touch something it starts to glow. It's a bit like in avatar and also like when you fly around or when you touch something there's sound coming. So we want to keep the player very comforted. But we want to still let him free. So our locomotion method is actually very, very experimental. But we added a lot of things to it which makes you not feel motion sick very easily. So to have kind of this balance between having a comfort experience but still letting the player explore total freedom. And he can decide himself. He can also just like not look at all at some art pieces but just try to fly around the planet the whole time. So it's totally up to him. We don't have any restrictions actually because it's a virtual world and we want to let him free so there's no narrative to it. Thanks. Yeah. Mike. Oh, sorry. Hello. Thanks for the app because I think VR is about getting to know places that you can't go to. And if there are only two pieces of the piece of art it's really wonderful to get to explore it. My question or my two questions are how close did the artist work together with you concerning the game concept, the gameplay? And were they aware of how you present their art in the lucid dream version? And what about the rights because you said that you also do 3D printing and is there, how is this legally? Because I think it's quite difficult to get artists to lose the control of what happens next with their piece of art. Yeah, true. These were some questions just remind me if I forgot any of them. So I'm working very close together with all of these artists and what we first show them is how lucid trips looks like. So that's what we do. This is the art gallery and you can be part of that. And I'm working very close with them regarding the appearance of their artwork in the virtual world if they like it, if they want to change colors, if they want to let it float or not or want to be as realistic as possible, but also with the interaction part. So I talk to them a lot. Some artists are more open to it or just like, yeah, we should do that and we should do this. And other artists are more like, yeah, actually, I just want to have it like that. It shouldn't change anything. It should just be as it is. So it's totally different and that's also how we do it. So every artist is different. Everything is different and it's working very well like that. And regarding the 3D printing thing, it's so some of the artists already agreed to have it just that it's just possible to 3D print it, but they want to charge something. And what we do is we are not having any 3D model like the actual scan model online. It's just textures. So we have a really rough, low-poly model of the actual art piece and then we put a texture around it, a shader, which makes it look like the actual art piece. So it's kind of a photograph. So that's how we make it safe and make it the artist's decision if he wants to purchase them as a 3D print and for how much money. So they can give it away for free if they like to. We would be cool with that, but they can also charge money. So that's not our thing, but we are just hosting the gallery. Okay. Thank you, Sarah. And I have to interrupt at this point because her time is up, but thank you. Warm applause for her. Please again. Thanks. Thank you.
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Through the new medium Virtual Reality there are never seen possibilities in making art visible in completely new and innovative ways. Creative minds out there are using latest tech to add new vividness to the common presentation of artworks. New ways of visualisation and storytelling are being explored and discovered. But one has to step into the Matrix to explore it hisself.
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10.5446/20691 (DOI)
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Sarah Hildner, she is research assistant at Charité Berlin. We'll introduce us in the field of gender medicine. Yes, thank you very much. We're waiting for the presentation to be set up. Till then I can just introduce myself. I'm a physical therapist and also a sociologist. And I'm currently doing my masters in sociology researching how gender medicine is being implemented all over Europe in medical studies. I help you with the... Yeah. Right there. 16. And the sex standard met. Okay. And my bachelor thesis, I looked into cardiology textbooks and how the sexes are being represented there. And it was very fascinating because the books I looked into were from late 2000s and they actually missed most of the current knowledge about heart attack in women and men and how they differentiate, which was very surprising to me because the knowledge has been researched for the past 40 years by now. And maybe now I will have a presentation as well. There's also a hashtag. I want to introduce this hashtag sex gender met as an abbreviation for sex and gender sensitive medicine. And if you want to reach me on Twitter, it's Sophie Hildner. And I will... Maybe we'll start seeing something. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a Republican. You did a session here two years ago and it was more exercise. Maybe we could do some exercises or do we get... Yeah, something to wake you all up because you've been probably sitting all day. Please follow me. This is the rabbit. Just do it yourself. And this is the hunter. Now the rabbit is a really smart cookie. So he jumps around, makes a turn and suddenly they switch the role. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Try to just do the hunter and switching the hands. Yeah, great. I see some hunters are missing the hook. Oh, there's a three-eared rabbit. Okay. Now the rabbit can usually jump. So only the rabbit jumps, of course, the hunter can't do this because then it won't work. Okay, yeah. And one more level would be the hunter is shooting, the rabbit is jumping. In case you're really frustrated with your work and you need a break and laugh about yourself, this always does the trick for me. Took me like a year to do it like I do it now. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to be here. Thank you all for being here. Is there a question in advance? If you shouted loud enough, I can repeat it. So we have it on. Okay. I will try to just do the talk, but I do need my slides for myself. So we're going to start an ancient medicine. That's where it all started because the widespread belief was that there's only one body and that actually all humankind is male, but that the females did not have enough fire inside them to turn their internal organs out. So they're the men. So women were always the imperfect version of a man. Can I continue here? And we call it the one sex model, meaning that there's only this one sex. And later on, this dominant ideal of masculinity and that the men are perfect, leading to women being imperfect and the more sexual, the more carnal versions of man. And this was supported by religious beliefs and it continued to develop hierarchical models inside society. So actually society reflected this belief and made sure that women were dominated and subordered and that most privileges were reserved for white, educated, healthy, middle and upper class men, all based on the belief that these bodies, they have a hierarchical order as well. Now I can't even look at my slides. So there was this one sex model. Everybody is the same. They're all men except the ones that are not men. They're imperfect men so they can be dominated by the perfect men. Then times changed. Whoa. Yes, times changed. Thank you very much. Thank you for your presentation. I wanted to start with this because this is one of the quotes in one of the medical textbooks I have. It is referring to a myocardial infarction and in the case of a heart attack that you have to immobilize the patient and remove restricting clothes, the tight shirt collar and the neck tie. Unfortunately, she's a woman. Having a bra while having a heart attack can be quite uncomfortable as well. So this is for me a perfect example why women are out of the picture, not only in but also explicitly when referring to diseases. So the imperfect men we already have, the privileges. In modernity, we had certain revelations. The microscope was developed. Natural science were developing as well. And they all challenged religious and traditional beliefs that there was a hierarchical order. But the one that challenged the most was Darwin when he said that the origin of the species actually was in contradiction to what the Bible was saying. So then everybody focused suddenly on genes and on hormones trying to establish the belief that men and women are so differently that it actually, from the 16th to 19th century, especially on brain studies, the belief changed rapidly. Like on one century, men were the emotional ones, then women were the emotional ones. Then men were the emotional ones again. So you see that the signs, they all backed it up by what they called signs, have helped them to show that there are difference between the sexes to actually find a validation for a social order that was dominant. Then they moved on to the two sex model. And this originated the term bikini medicine as we have it today. Like all the parts being covered by a bikini referring only to the reproductive organs of women, which are all outsourced in gynecology, but assuming that in all other areas of medical education and well as medical treatment actually are the same. Because we still, in medical tradition, it's still believed and assumed that the actual body of men and women are the same. And that is the problem we are fighting against in sex and gender sensitive medicine. So to come to the point today where we actually do research on the differences of the biological sexes, and I am referring to your genome and your setup, and if it is an XY, an XXY, or two X's, or one of the other many variations there are, you do have a genome that is influencing how your body reacts to certain aspects of nature, to make you vulnerable to certain diseases. And so that we can all do this right now has a long tradition of fighting for rights, fighting for interest in those matters, and that evolved from human rights movements, women rights movements, then came women health aspects that were very interesting. And then the women's, out of women's health, and that is one problem we always have to fight against when we're talking about sex and gender sensitive medicine, is that everybody believes it's only for women. And well, to a certain aspect, yes, we have to catch up a lot of the research that hasn't been done for women right now, but we also discover a lot of things that are very helpful for men as well, and I will come to that in a minute. Basic definition of sex and gender, actually, when I say sex, I'm talking about your biological setup of your body, the way your genome is designed, and how these hormones, for example, will influence how you metabolize medication. And women are actually having a menstrual cycle. There are three phases where they react very differently to medication, and that has not been researched properly because it's very expensive because you would need a group of women that are premenstrual, you will have a group of women that are menstruating, you will have a group of women that is postmenopause, and of all these women you also need several groups inside them due to the cycles they go through, which makes research in this area very expensive because you would have per age group at least nine groups, at least for the women. And I'm pretty sure that men have cycles as well, although don't that as obvious as maybe the female ones. When I talk about gender, I'm referring to gender roles, gender identity that is actually produced constantly in society. How we act as men, how we act as women, how we act as trans person, how we are classified by our looks and perceived and what the expectations to us are, and that also influences in medicine, for example, the way you take your medicine, how you're complying with doctors' orders. Women tend to comply a lot better than men. Women sometimes do, sometimes don't care about when they take the medication they are prescribed. I also want to make sure that it's not all men and all women, I'm talking about statistics and most prominent groups. Some results from science. In cardiology, for example, the heart attack has symptoms most people know as a strong chest pain, pain going through the left side of your body and feeling very uncomfortable. In women, nausea, vomiting and back pain, you dissociate instantly with a heart attack. Unfortunately not yet, but they are more prominent in women, but they are also men that can have only these symptoms and suffering a heart attack. So we need to catch up on research and update all the textbooks on it as well. Women have the heart attack a lot later and if you have diabetes, you're more prone to receive a heart attack in general, at least twice as likely as a healthy man and at least four times as likely as a healthy woman. So when you are diabetic and you're female, you're having a heart attack is very likely event. In therapy, yes, and when you're smoking and taking oral contraception is also endangering you of suffering a heart attack and or a stroke as well. And it was only mentioned in one book of the 10 I have investigated from the 2008 to 2012, which was a very big surprise because the amount of women smoking is increasing as well. And oral contraception is also available and being taken very frequently. Aspirin on the other side is preventing men from having a heart attack, but not women. In women it prevents more having a stroke. Why this is? They haven't really found out, but there's still research going on, but that it is a fact has been proven by several researchers. And what you all can do to prevent a heart attack is do at least one hour of sports a week. Another thing is that when you have high blood pressure, the risk of suffering it depends not only on your age and your sex, but also on your ethnicity and of course your background. And I want to point out, can I point? I can't point. Like this? No. Can I go in? Yes, can you help me with this? What I want to point out is, I need to get this window away. I want to point out that the numbers for the people of color being 50 and 60 are actually the same as for the white people when they're 60 and 70. So when you're a person of color, you are 10 years earlier and being prone to having a heart attack, which brings me to the point that actually that the incidence of diseases is often correlated with your access to and your understanding of knowledge and the healthcare system. So poverty actually makes sick and since more women are on the poor side in all over the world, they're more likely to be sick as well. In psychiatry, depression have variations in the symptoms. Women tend to react more with anxiety while men tend more to be substance abusers and addicts and also tend to turn out their depression and show it in more aggressive behavior. And when you think about it, anxiety and aggression are like two parts of a spectrum and they're kind of also related to gender identity because aggression is also seen as a very masculine trait and being timid and rather withdrawn, a more feminine trait, at least what concerns the gender identity in our society, which I think is kind of remarkable. In the therapy of severe depression, when you need to take medication to come back to life again, tricyclical antidepressants are more helpful than men and have been proven that they have a better effect than men while SSRIs, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, more helpful in women. Osteoporosis is, in most people known as a female disease, and yes, women are more endangered to having osteoporosis, but men we found out are also endangered to suffering from osteoporosis. And the most interesting thing is that the last part is the five-year survival rate after your first fracture due to osteoporosis, and that is when you're a woman, you're more likely to survive it because most times the doctors in yourself are more aware that it's actually a possibility to have osteoporosis anyway. And in men it comes often as a surprise because doctors are still not aware that it is possible, that it's likely for men to have osteoporosis. The neurology, multiple sclerosis and migraine is more prominent in women, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and epilepsy is more common in men. Now the trait, the treat at the end for me is always pharmacology because there's so much going on there that is very, very bad for particularly women because most test subjects are young, healthy men. And one example is the Viagra for women that had a measured effect in the trial participants of 9 to 14%, which was the same as the placebo, so you actually don't know if it had an effect. And the FDA approved it after some trials that included 25 people, and since it was a medication, for women they even had two women in the test group, which I think is so ridiculous that I don't even, I'm missing the words. So hands on, communicate with your doctor, particularly if you notice reactions with medication, especially as a woman, most of the medication has not been tried out for men and women. A lot of the side effects are heavier in women, and particularly if you're a very slender woman, the medication might be overdosed for your body weight and height. And if you want to challenge your doctor, ask them if you have to consider your menstrual cycle in any way by taking the medication at a certain point because that does have influence on how your body metabolizes it and how long it stays in your system. So ask your doctor if he or she knows about the sex differences because we all have to work together to raise awareness for the whole subject because it is still not a part of the curriculum in medical education. Only a few schools all over Europe have some courses, most of them are not mandatory but electives, and we all need to take care that our doctors stay up to date with what they know. Thank you very much. And there will be an advanced metered greet at 2 p.m. at the mattresses behind the dome with my colleagues from Hacking with Care. They're presenting on stage two right now, so please check out their talk when we are all done, and it's online because we are collaborating to help activists with their bodies and their well-being. Yes, now it's time for questions and answers. Thank you very much. So funny so that was a mic. Any questions? I'm wondering, like every now and then you get to read some articles about actually the oral contraception for men has been invented, but there's no interest in introducing it to society. Do you have a stand on that? Or statistics even, maybe? I don't have a statistics on it, but it is difficult to bring contraception to men because it is, although there are some voices that cry out and say I want it, I need it, as far as I know, they haven't had an impact yet to actually develop it and bring it to the main market. I would think it would be great to be responsible and take care of your own fertility in that way, particularly as a man. Any other questions? We have time for another question. Who's next? There's a mic. Lady over there. Can you raise your hand to show funny where you are? The rabbit is running again. I was wondering, because you closed by saying we should all kind of question decisions our doctors make or at least kind of ask for reasons why they do that. Don't you think this issue has to be tackled at a different level? Because I feel like at first doctors are technically in a hierarchical position because we assume they have knowledge that we don't have, which is the reason why we go to them in the first place. And then if we say generally they're not aware of this or of many aspects of this, how can we rely on them giving us a reasonable explanation for something that they don't really know about? So don't you think at what other level do you think is necessary to kind of tackle the problem in that case? One thing I think is important is approach. And that's what I'm also doing or what we're doing in gender medicine societies is approaching specialist societies like the cardiologist society and the society of the neurologists and approach them and tell them how about that you start at least offering courses where medical doctors, I mean every medical doctor at least in Germany has to collect a certain amount of education classes a year and they're required to do it or otherwise they lose the license. But as far as I know none of the big associations have yet introduced a course for gender sensitive treatment or information for the doctors. So that is one part that's really rigid and what I experienced from the medical system because you said it's hierarchical when you come as a patient but the medical system inside itself has also a strong hierarchy and it hasn't been yet so gender friendly and sex sensitive so far. And there's still only little rules asking researchers to proclaim the sex of their cells but every cell has a sex as well and reacts accordingly and every mouse and rat they use also has a sex at least I wouldn't call it gender in their case but they have a sex. So there's so much to be done yes and I'm not so optimistic that I will actually benefit from it in a couple of years it's more that the generation after us or even that generation after that will actually benefit from all of us working together being aware and even just slightly questioning like are you sure I have to take the whole pill or should I take half a pill twice a day instead of one pill at one time at a day. I mean little things like that can actually help everyone and if your doctor doesn't know with you he hopefully looks it up and gives you information on it. Do we have time for a question? We have time for a question no problem. Who's next? Are you all specialists in gender medicine or not? Probably. Are there any more questions? Ah yeah. Please take some mic too. You have recording. Okay so the other thing I was wondering is because you said in the beginning you know female health was kind of pushed into the gynecology sphere where I am wondering did you look at that at all because from my experience for example prescribing the pill as a contraceptive in a lot of cases at least with the people I know and with myself also was also connected to me not being entirely informed of what kind of long term effect that has. Die ist schneller fertig. On my body. Sorry so you're asking about. Geht du da lang? Geht du noch? That your doctor wasn't informing you about long term effects of contraception because it was just a golden standard. Kind of yeah. Kind of yes. If you say I have problems with my skin people will tell you you know you could take the pill but they don't tell you what's you know it's much bigger than. Exactly. Exactly. I was just interested if you kind of looked into that issues around gynecology as well or. Not particularly but you have to assume that that medical system I mean it is very complex to treat a human being and to be aware of all these things going on so by adding the dimension of sex and gender it will make it even more complicated but I think we are all suited to actually understand this kind of complexity and yes this oh there's this new medication let's give it to everyone hasn't worked out in the past and unfortunately several examples and like this Viagra for women how medication is approved still is very questionable at least if not endangering many people and a lot of medication for treating heart disease in elderly people have led to several women dying because the medication was overdosed for their bodies in particular now yes so. Okay thank you very much. It's a new upcoming question or otherwise I would say thank you very much for this insight in gender medicine it was very very interesting thank you very much. Thank you thank you all for listening and the interesting questions.
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Sex- and gender-specific medicine (SGSM) is a young field that managed to recently establish itself all over the world. Though mostly called gender medicine it actually investigates sex specific differences of the two most prominent sexes: male and female. There are also aspects of the gender identity that impact the interaction of doctors and patients, as well as coping strategies, treatment suggestions and side effects of medication The following aspects will be presented in this talk: Where does this area of research come from? What does it actually do? Why is it important for women and men? And when is it appropriate to talk about sex and when to talk about gender?
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10.5446/20692 (DOI)
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người interpersonal Rachel So when I began this research in 2010, the way I started out with it was by reading over coffee one day, reading a really small article in the New York Times that was actually more of an afterthought piece in the technology section. And it talked about a group of workers in rural Iowa in the United States and the Midwest in an area that had been traditionally a family farm area. And these workers were transitioning from family farms which were no longer economically viable in that part of the country and moving into working into call center like environments for a firm called Calaris. And you can see their website here. This is a screenshot from it from a few years ago. The workers were performing a number of call center like tasks. They were answering phones and doing this kind of thing. But in addition to that, they were performing a new form of labor that was going under a number of different names, screening, content moderation, forum moderation, social media, management, and so on. And the workers in Iowa were working for just above minimum wage. They were hourly workers. They were working without benefits which in the U.S. is a significant factor because it meant they were without healthcare. And as the New York Times reported, these workers were beginning to suffer some psychological issues based on the work they were doing as content moderators. What they were doing was screening various social media sites as well as other kinds of commercial websites and seeing uploaded content, user generated content day after day, image after image, video after video, and screening it for appropriateness for a site. As you can imagine, a lot of what they were seeing was in fact inappropriate and it was inappropriate on the grounds of it being potentially obscene, pornographic, but also content that was extremely violent, violence towards children, violence towards animals, adults, engaged in violence, war zone footage, and other kinds of materials such as this. And the workers were reporting some difficulty in managing their ability to look at this content constantly, especially at such a low wage without any type of benefits. So I was intrigued by this story. I turned to my colleagues who were all digital media experts, academics who dedicated their life work to studying the Internet and digital media. I myself have been online since 1993 when our social media platform was literally in a guy's closet on a server, a guy named Jeff, anyway. So my sense of moderation was really more around voluntary kinds of activities. And when I asked my peers and my professors if they'd ever heard of this type of work, two things happened. The first thing is that they said no, they hadn't. The second thing they said, which is probably what you're thinking is, well, can't computers do that? And in fact, the answer to that is no, and I'll talk a bit more about that. In the meantime, I visited Calaris's webpage and I was stunned to discover their own tagline, which as you can read up here was outsourced to Iowa, not India, with this bucolic farm scene that really reflects the reality that's no longer even in existence in Iowa. It's all factory farms and agribusiness there. So just to give you more of a sense, definitionally, of what commercial content moderation really looks like. It's a globalized, around-the-clock set of practices in which workers, such as the Calaris workers and others, view and adjudicate massive amounts of user-generated content, or UGC, in industry lingo, destines for the world's social media platforms and interactive websites. While the workers' status and remuneration vary widely depending on site and circumstance in the world, there are some features that this work tends to share. Really, CCM work is typically unglamorous, repetitive, and often exposes workers to content that is disturbing, violent, or psychologically damaging all of the condition of the work that they do. This screenshot is from YouTube's flagging system a few years ago, which you as a user can go to if you come across content that you find disturbing or otherwise inappropriate based on site guidelines and you can report it. For YouTube, that triggers the content moderation process to begin. So we as users participate in the process of CCM by our own reactions to the content we see. So CCM workers, in the course of their work, render content visible or invisible while simultaneously remaining invisible themselves. In the world of CCM, the sign of a good job is to leave no sign at all. And yet the mediation work done by CCM workers goes directly to shaping the landscape of social media and the UGC-dominated internet that we all participate in, where platforms are simply as empty vessels for users to fill up with whatever they will and for CCM workers to act in effect as a gatekeeper between the users and platforms, providing brand protection on behalf of the companies and the platform owners which they demand. Companies that tend to utilize CCM services, whether they are the third-party companies that often employ the workers or the major platforms themselves, avoid talking about their moderation practices. In fact, they'll often treat it as a trade secret and they subject their workers to non-disclosure agreements or NDAs that preclude the workers from speaking about the nature and conditions of their work. Yet, despite the hidden nature of CCM, it is in fact essential component of the production and circulation of social media. The screen here is a leaked document from a number of years ago through the third-party firm, Odesk, a micro task website that had this reporting guide from Facebook. And again, following the circuit, you can see the type of material that is often found in the CCM process and then therefore get an idea of what those workers are exposed to even though they're unable to discuss it freely because of their NDAs. And this is a screenshot from YouTube's community guidelines. Again, if you want to know what kind of material workers see, go to your favorite platform and look at community guidelines or the other kinds of rules and regulations that govern the UGC that can be included and you'll see it there. So making decisions about what UGC is acceptable and what is not is actually a highly complex process as I indicated. At this point, it's well beyond the capabilities of software algorithms alone. Some firms do employ some level of batch processing and some measure of algorithmic moderation, but typically this work falls to human agents. And just to give you a sense of the kind of content stream or the volume that we're talking about, YouTube itself really receives over 100 hours of uploaded video per minute. So the normity of the UGC that is created for each platform is just exponential if you think about that amount of content per minute. So some of this will go through machine automation, but the material that's flagged usually by people like you and me will be typically rerouted through a circuit like the one you just saw a few minutes ago to a human agent in some place in the world. And whether or not the screening happens before the content is uploaded, which is the case for some platforms, but typically after it has been posted in most, human content moderators are called upon to employ an array of very high level cognitive functions and cultural competencies to make decisions about the appropriateness of such content for a site or platform. So in order to do this, they must be experts in matters of taste of the site's presumed audience, have cultural knowledge about the location of origin of the platform and of the audience, both of which may be very far removed geographically and culturally from where the screening is actually taking place. Have linguistic competency in the language of the UGC that may be a learned or second language for the content moderator, him or herself. Be steeped in the relevant laws governing the site's location of origin and be experts in the user guidelines and other platform level specific concerning what is or what is not allowed, all the while being exposed constantly to the very material that mainstream sites disallow. And just to give you an idea of the volume of processing, we're talking about thousands of images a day that these workers are asked to view or thousands of videos. So the work has to be very quick. All of that having been said, CCM isn't an industry unto itself per se. In fact, it's a labor process or set of processes that take place across a number of industries and as such is stratified in the way that I have listed here. So some firms have the capability both technologically and financially to have workers right on site with them. This is the case for many of the major Silicon Valley social media firms. They will have an in-house team, although I should point out that those workers are often contract laborers. So they will lack the full-timers badge. As some workers joke with me, this means they can't access the climbing wall in the lobby of their building. They can't get the free sushi and kombucha that's on availability for the full-time workers. But at the same time, it also means they didn't have the health benefits that full-time workers access. So I think about the psychological needs of these workers that is an important issue. There are boutique firms, social media agencies, much like ad firms that provide CCM-like practices and they will also even go so far as to seed content that is more favorable. So they'll take down the bad stuff for a brand image and put in content that is positive. Of course, as I mentioned, we have call centers. We have call centers all over the world and I'll talk about where those are located. And finally, we have micro-labor websites, Amazon's Mechanical Turk Upwork, informally known as ODesk and other sites like this, where workers come together in a digital piece work manner doing one piece of digital labor for one contract, meeting and separating. A lot of CCM work goes on in this kind of environment for as little as one cent per image viewed and then there's absolutely no relation between the firm and the employee after that one screening takes place. So I'll talk to you a bit now about the case of a firm I call Megatech. This is a Silicon Valley based firm. I am not able to share with you the name of the firm. It's real name because of the ethics guidelines that I'm under as a researcher but it's one that all of you know and have used and are probably using now. They have many major global brands and platforms and it's one of the firms that from an economic and technological perspective can support a team of CCM workers on site. All of their workers, although they were contractors coming in from a third party, were required to be college graduates, university graduates with four year degrees. And they were coming to Megatech with elite backgrounds from places like the University of California at Berkeley for example or the University of Southern California and other four year liberal arts colleges. However they were coming not from science, technology and engineering backgrounds but actually the lesser disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. So things that Silicon Valley wasn't putting as much value on. That's where they were coming into the CCM process from their four year university degrees. For those that I interviewed and spoke with, all of whom were in their early 20s just a couple of years out of the university. The notion that they could get a job in the Northern California Silicon Valley environment was alluring to them and it was loaded with promise. They went into this work with the hope that they might do CCM for a year or two and then transition at Megatech into one of the more lucrative and one of the more well respected and valued jobs. But unfortunately in no case did that actually happen. The workers would come in on a year long contract. They would do CCM as a full time job for a year. They would be made to take a three month break during which time their employment and financial issues were theirs to solve and then they could come back for one more contract after which time they were terminated from doing CCM work for Megatech at all. So that leads you to question why it is that the firm itself wants people who can only work for two years and then are cycled out. Nevertheless for the young people who were doing CCM work for Megatech, it seemed to be at least in the beginning a better option for them than working in the service sector jobs that they thought were going to be available to them upon graduation. And this was right after in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn in the U.S. So they were looking at taking their Berkeley degrees to be baristas and pizza servers in restaurants in the Bay Area and in California and working in the offices of Megatech seemed to give them stature and a chance at a better economic future and perhaps a chance to work in a social media career beyond that. Max Breen was 24 when I spoke with him. He was a graduate of a four year liberal arts college and graduated of course with the debt that many American university students graduate with. And this was the case for all the employees at Megatech. They had these elite degrees but they were saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and that was something that they were very concerned about. Max was living in the Bay Area with about four roommates. He was making $48,000 a year with the benefits at the end of the day working hourly for that wage. And Max was a particularly insightful person about the work that he was doing with CCM. He indicated to me that although he was trained so to speak to leave the material that he saw on the job and just sort of tap out psychologically and mentally when he left it was really difficult for him to do that and in fact he found himself going home and ruminating about the things that he had seen at work. Images of child abuse, images of people giving hate speech, diatribes, racist content, misogynistic content, violence towards women, violence towards animals. One of the things that Max indicated to me that the most difficult content for him to see was footage coming out of the Syrian crisis and the Syrian war zone that was coming from people on the ground there who were sending the material to Megatech ostensibly for advocacy purposes. They wanted to use the platform to get a wider audience to share with the world what was going on. Max was particularly insightful about his platform's relationship to things like the Syrian crisis because if we were to go back and look at some of the kinds of community guidelines that a platform like Facebook or YouTube or any other mainstream platform has which Megatech is, certainly the kind of footage that he was receiving from Syria would contraven all of those rules. It was violence against children, it was gratuitous, it was gory and it was unrelenting. But nevertheless the group above him that made policy at Megatech indicated to him that in fact the Syrian material would stand and it would stand on Megatech and be allowed to be perpetuated. Max himself started thinking about this because at the same time he was receiving numerous videos from the Mexican state of Juarez where a serious drug war and drug violence has been going on for a long time. Max pointed out to me that the case of Syria was interesting because there's certainly a U.S. foreign policy dimension there. Megatech being a U.S. company seemed to be aligning itself with the U.S. viewpoint on the Syrian crisis. At the same time he noted that the U.S. also had extreme involvement and a relationship to the drug wars in Juarez and that material was not allowed to stand under any circumstances even though it was coming in ostensibly under the same advocacy rubric as the Syrian footage. And he started to feel some frustration against these kinds of incongruent episodes in his work. Josh Santos was another worker. He had graduated from Berkeley and had been working at Megatech for almost two years and was ready to cycle out. He referred to his work at Megatech as being immersed in a hole of filth and he would do that, be immersed in that hole of filth eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. Both Max and Josh began to have trouble in their private lives with the material that they were seeing. Because of the non-disclosure agreements they were precluded from talking to friends and talking to others about the content that they were seeing at work and the kind of work they were doing and therefore the effect it was having on them. But all of the Megatech workers indicated to me that in fact they didn't want to tell other people about what they were seeing because they felt that it would be a burden upon them. They all had a sense of altruism. They had a sense that they were making the Internet even possible for us to use. Some of the other workers I spoke to told me that without CCM work most of us wouldn't be able to stomach the Internet for long. Those of you who have ever had the misfortune to make an errant click on a video that you had unexpectedly stumbled across that was something like a beheading or something like that, know what I mean. These workers were engaged every day looking at that content and then taking it down so that other people didn't have to see it. In spite of this the workers under their NDAs who weren't sharing this information with partners and with loved ones were having real effects in their personal life. Max indicated to me that he had started drinking a lot more, for example. Another story I heard was of one of the workers when he would find himself in an intimate situation with his partner. He would be embracing her. They would be getting into an intimate situation and suddenly an image of a video he had seen and taken down at work would flash before his eyes and he would push his partner away and when she asked for an explanation he couldn't even find the words to share. Not only were they precluded in a contractual way from discussing the content that they saw, it was an emotional barrier and it was an emotional barrier that was beginning to cause rifts between them and the people in their lives, isolating them even further in the CCM work they were doing. All of this leads me to the point to ask about, is this basically the internet we were promised? Is this the digital labor environment that we were promised and also where are the flying cars? As many of you may know, since the early 1970s, particularly in an American context, there has been a shift in labor from the manufacturing sector moving into so-called knowledge work, that would focus on technical work, specialized scientific and other types of knowledge, the very STEM degrees that I was discussing earlier, and an increased importance and predominance of technological innovation. All of this, of course, we were told, would lead to this, right? More leisure time, easier working conditions. And to be fair, CCM work doesn't put workers in any kind of direct physical harm. It's not the heavy manufacturing that might cause someone to lose a limb or an appendage. It doesn't physically harm them, but certainly there are these other outcomes that are actually insidious, and we can't see them, and that's what makes them so frightening. I can tell you that back in the era of manufacturing in the United States, my grandfather worked in the same factory for 45 years. He never had to check an email off hours. He was never called to be on a 24 by 7 response cycle, as many of these workers now are. And alongside with this transformation into the Knowledge Society, we've seen some other changes too that you're all familiar with. Privatization of state resources, a deregulation of industry, fewer worker protections, a cheapening of labor, globalization processes, all of which are a pertin-pursel of the way CCM operates today. In fact, great geospatial, economic, and political reconfigurations have taken place to facilitate the obfuscation of the material and immaterial labor, such as CCM, that underpins the very knowledge economy that we're talking about, often via these practices like outsourcing and other types of migratory practices. In the case of the Philippines, which you can see here, this is Makati City, one of the major financial and economic centers in Manila, this often takes the form of special economic zones or special industrial zones where firms can relocate and get special dispensations such as no taxes or really good tax breaks, so they can build infrastructure only for themselves and provided only for those businesses while they're next sort of areas that have brownouts. So CCM work is increasingly migrating to places like the Philippines, and the Philippines, at just one tenth of the population size of India, has now surpassed India as the call center capital of the world. And micro sourcing is just one firm that solicits for Western CCM needs. You can see here that it advertises as having a whole bevy of workers who have excellent English skills and familiarity with colloquial slang, American slang, and so on. They don't really go into why that is, I'll draw that out in a moment. They also offer a virtual captive service for those who might be interested in that, the rather unfortunately named service. This is a place in the Philippines called Eastwood City, it's the first IT cyber park there. And so a lot of times what we've seen there is a case of extremely uneven development where we have these cyber parks and other IT sectors looking something like this, while right next door we have this, and this is what I call the paperless office. So all of this is giving us a pretty significant bifurcation and an exercise in extremes. And I want to say it's not just in the Philippines where we see this, we see this in Silicon Valley, the difference between places like Mountain View where Google has headquartered next door to East Palo Alto, one of the most impoverished places in that region. Just a few words about the Philippines, and you're going to hear much more about that in a moment from the second presenter. But I want to give you some context. Metro Manila itself is comprised of 17 individual cities, each governed independently and makes its own rules, by and large, rules that are quite favorable to businesses like CCM. And it has a population of 12 million people as of 2014, plus all the people who flow in and out every day to do work in what they call BPO's or call centers as we know them. The call center sector over the past few decades has become increasingly important, and it's the main sector beyond the government sector in the Philippines now. What we're seeing there, and what we see elsewhere, not just in the Philippines, but in this particular case especially, is a series of intertwined and symbiotic relationships among different systems. So we're seeing state and governmental policy regimes that are favorable for businesses that are doing CCM and other types of low level, if you will, digital labor to locate in places like the Philippines. We're seeing land and physical infrastructure development to support this kind of work and to make these great centers of this kind of work. Finally, we're seeing from a labor perspective, availability, preparation, and also processes that all go towards enhancing this. One of the things that the Philippines governmental agency in charge with soliciting companies to come to the Philippines does is they tell you that there are very few strikes in these economic zones. Great for business. I don't know if that's so great for workers. So if we look at this 1923 map, we can see, interestingly, this is the trade routes of the Orient. We'll see that these trade routes are actually mirrored in the way data is flowing in and out of the Philippines today. And you can see there's a direct route right there to San Francisco. And that continues to this day. I went to the Philippines last May and I talked to CCM workers there. We met at a TGI Friday at 7 a.m., which was happy hour for the workers there. They were meeting and drinking after their CCM shift. And they reported to me a number of themes. Again, they were very similar to their American counterparts. They were young people with university degrees looking for a good paying job. And this is what was on offer to them. And they took it willingly, but it had the same kinds of implications and ramifications for them. Again, no access to psychological services. And also, what does it really mean if you access psychological services when your job is to be able to stomach this very content that is disturbing you? So I'm going to close just with a few pieces of food for thought as we go into the next talk. What is that stake when we talk about CCM? Well, certainly we're talking about some little known and yet mission critical digital labor activities that go to underpin and undergird the social media platforms that we all know and use. We're talking about some problematic labor forms from the worker perspective, a work that can put workers into a precarious position, often with very little job security. And finally, we're talking about a practice that actually troubles the notion, the increasingly problematic notion of the internet as a free speech zone and as a site of democratic intervention. In fact, there are a whole army of people across the world making decisions about content that people put into social media platforms and whether it should stay or go. And they're making those decisions largely on the basis of what will be favorable to the platform itself. There are all these intermediaries in there. We know that CCM workers are there now. Who else is there? The NSA. We know they're there. Surveillance is taking place. So who else is in the mix? This is something we need to really think about if we're going to have honest conversations about the utility of the internet as a site of democratic intervention going forward. And I'll leave you with this last slide. It's a slide of Eastwood City itself that I took pictures of. Many people thought I was thinking it was a fine, high art piece and they wanted to let me know it wasn't. It was actually just junky corporate art. But in fact, I found it fascinating. You can see these are workers with headsets on. It's a monument to Eastwood City's BPO call center workers, many of whom are CCM workers. And the plaque on the bottom is dedicated to Eastwood City's modern heroes. And I'll leave it there. Thank you.
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Commercial content moderators are unseen, unknown internet gatekeepers, responsible for ridding social media of violent, extreme and shocking material, on behalf of major firms who require their services.
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10.5446/20698 (DOI)
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So, hello everyone. This talk is in English. I don't know how many of you are actually not native-speaking German, but we don't care actually because it's taped, a video recorded. And the second thing is it's the result of some research project that we have been pursuing over the last month or so. And we found it appropriate to use the language that we originally did our research in. So, please excuse our accent. So, the man who sold the moon is the title of Robert Heinlein's, I would say, most prominent novel. It was published in 1949. This is the original paperback cover. And this is a very good book actually. Heinlein was a very political thinker. And although the thing that he sketched in the 1950s, so way before anyone really envisioned actually flying to the moon, is what would happen if we commoditize, if we really make commercial use of space? And the character that he describes in this book are the protagonist, Dave Herrimann, is the typical hoaxterist, is someone who lives from commercialization of everything. And he uses every trick to get hold of the moon as private property and to exploit that. And the interesting thing is that this used to be, I would say, a fantasy. It's more like the typical utopian set for criticizing the actual situation of the 1950s in the liberal market economy of the after Second World War time. But times have changed. We all have seen the space race. We have seen the Star Trek age. This is what's left of that. It's in my garden actually. That's what my children left of my beloved enterprise model. Yeah. In the 1980s, I would say, after the space shutters started, I would say soon after that, and at least when the Challenger catastrophe took place, space became rather unfashionable. The 1990s were the time of the digital revolution. As Peter Thiel, the famous paper co-founder, aggressive venture capitalist in the US, always keeps complaining, people took the right turn then. They started mistaking digital for everything there is in technology. And so he now says, we need to come up with real things again. And what could be more real than space? And so nowadays, space has become really popular. If you see this recent Wired magazine, it's on the cover page. And you find people that are interested and that love space everywhere. This photo is taken at South by Southwest, and it's just somebody playing in a band wearing this T-shirt. Or you have a recent production in Munich of the musical here, and you find space even there. Also in literature, Neil Stevenson's latest novel published exactly one year ago, Seven Eves. I would say for me, it's the most impressive thing that he published so far. The setup is in orbital space. This is the International Space Station ISS that becomes the arc where humanity survives the catastrophe, a catastrophic, cataclysmic event that incinerates everyone on Earth, and only seven people on this ISS survive, all women. And from that, over 5,000 years time, establish an orbital civilization that becomes humanity, an orbital humanity. This novel is really interesting. It's like 800 pages or so, so it's as thick as the Bible, and encyclopedic in the details of spacefair. For example, and I found really interesting is these inflatable modules that were meant to hold something like four to seven people. That soon after became reality. You might have seen that, that's the ISS with such an inflatable module now attached. So science fiction about space that was remote all the time, that was always just spaceships, Star Wars and the like, has become more like we know from cyberpunk, for example, a genre that really deals with things that are already happening. Orbital stations have been planned for quite a while. This is from 1980. That's also from the, I think that's from the late 70s. And this is a famous drawing by Werner von Braun from the 1940s, from a book of his that was published in 1950. And you see that Braun, way before the first orbital objects had been placed in space, envisioned a gigantic space station that keeps some kind of gravitational feelings through the centrifugal forces by spinning. Yeah, and all kinds of benefits. You know, we wouldn't have Teflon source pens without space. We would probably not have the microwave without radar, you know, all these blessings that space has already brought to us and what could be more blessful than really traveling there as a private businessman. And that's the business of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, also a founder of PayPal, a bit more than 10 years ago, realized that space was dominated by governments exclusively passing business to huge defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the likes. And that would be a totally inefficient business like all things a government does over time. At least this is what the liberal West Coast people think. And what would be easier then to use private venture to cut price not by half, but by 90%. And this is Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon rocket approaching the landing platform that's sea bound. So that's really science fictionary because Musk was not the first to land the spacecraft again, privately. It was his competitor, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who was his Blue Origin space venture has done that before. So something that as far as I know, most space agencies so far would have taken for totally impossible to re-land a rocket and reuse that has been now done several times by private ventures. So that really raises the pressure on the governmental bodies you see here. NASA reacts already. The space launch system, that's a very cheap satellite launching system that NASA starts. That's also a South by Southwest that was really inspiring conference this year. That's a rubber blow up. You know, like these small castles that you do for children, these Hüpfbogen. So they really mean it in terms of things getting, I would say, popular. Aesar President Werner, a very charismatic person, announced nothing less than building a European village on the moon. We know how that ended on the far side of the moon. We already did that. But of course, as a friend of mine who works for DLR, the competing other governmental organization in Germany that deals with space and air travel, Werner with his vision really manages to get all the talent from DLR now to Aesar. So that really makes some difference. Well, the moon is one thing. Harryman in the novel, the man who sold the moon, he smuggles these diamonds to convince people that in the carbon rich soil of the moon there would be a plethora of diamonds just sitting there to make it worthwhile traveling to there. Asteroids, of course, are resources of raw materials, especially iron, nickel, and all other heavy metals are plenty there, especially iron. So mining asteroids seems to be the next big thing in business. Planetary resources, for example, collect money to start that very soon. We come to that later when we discuss the legal cases. I mean, the diamonds can be a bit bigger. For example, in the carbon seas, we have amorphous carbon seas or Neptune, there is expected to be diamonds the size of houses sitting there. It would be really interesting to bring them back to Earth. Well, Asteroid mining then will be a business. I think we can expect that and that brought us to thinking how would we want space to be? What's the space that we would like to see for ourselves, maybe our children to use that kitschy phrase for times to come? Because I mean, this is, I would say, not so far from reality. And now we are in reality. We have seen how science fiction became reality in a technical way, and now this is the legal part of it, because technical development and human development and legal development go hand in hand. And here you see a screenshot by the web page of the US Congress, and you find the US commercial space launch competitiveness act. And the amazing thing is that this act was agreed upon just within half a year. And there you find a very interesting provision. And it says, a United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource shall be entitled to any of this resource, including to possess, to own, to transport, to use, and sell it in accordance with the applicable law and also all international law. At the later stage in this act, there's a disclaimer which says that by this act, the United States does not assert sovereignty or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over any celestial body to make sure that this is in line with international law. Now we fly around the earth and we land in Luxembourg. This is maybe something you wouldn't expect, but Luxembourg clearly states that it aims to become this space to be for innovative new space applications as well as space exploitation. So we have now seen here two examples of a very entrepreneurial approach to space law. The aim is to encourage private investment, and this is done by granting property rights to the actors so that companies can be secure that they can make money with what they are doing. So we are really facing a new dimension of exploration and use of outer space, and as we have just already heard, all these American companies that are willing to take risks, that are looking at the consumer, they set this new scene also for the new legislation. But so what is actually the legal framework in other parts of the world? Are we facing there the tragedy of the comments? And comments here is taking to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, maybe space, or even you understand this principle when you think of an office refrigerator. So if every individual is acting independently and rationally to their own self-interest altogether, they behave contrary to the common good. But this is not what we want for space. And therefore, space is rather driven by a different concept, an opposite concept, which is called the common heritage of mankind. And this concept is also known in other areas that are remote and characterized by difficult conditions for human actions. That are those areas that are interesting for scientific research and development, with benefit to all people. And these are international waters, including the international seabed and the antarctica. And so this concept, in its pure version, contains the following aspects. The use of the area is limited to exclusively peaceful purposes. The conduct of scientific research is freely and openly permissible. The region is not subject to appropriation of any kind, neither public nor private, neither national nor corporate. And we come back to that later. All people are expected to share in the management of common areas. And if natural resources were to be exploited, any economic benefits would be shared internationally. That's the pure version of it. And it has been enacted in international treaties for the different regions of the world in different ways. And I think it's quite clear that research is always allowed and international cooperation is encouraged. Then access to these regions is free. That's also part of the concept of the common good. That access is more important than appropriation. With regard to sovereignty, in space, there's no state that is sovereign. And antarctica, there were sovereignty claims in the past, but they were frozen when the treaty was adopted. And on the seaside, there's a system of different zones and the international waters are also not governed by any sovereignty concept. On military uses, in antarctica, any measures of military nature are prohibited. And in space, space is also to be used only for peaceful purposes, but that doesn't mean that all the measures are prohibited. But it's clearly stated that nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction are prohibited. On the exploitation side, the law of the sea establishes an international seabed authority that is based in Kingston, Jamaica, that manages mining rights. And so there's a commission on the limits of the continental shelves in New York that decides if exclusive economical zones of 200 nautical miles can be extended. With regard to antarctica, there were some discussions and the draft of a convention on the regulation of arctic mining of mineral resources, and that was not ratified. Instead, there was a complete ban introduced. And the last point that might be interesting is that tourism in antarctica also exists and the numbers have raised. In the 1990s, there were about 1,000 tourists in antarctica and in 2011, 25,000. And they all need authorization by a national authority. Okay. So that was the background. And now let's have a closer look at space law. What is interesting is that space law consists of basically five international treaties, and they were all developed at the time of the Cold War. This picture is from 1968, and it's the opening ceremony of the first United Nations conference on the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space. And so far, there have been only three of these conferences, one in 1968, another one in 1982, and one in 1999. And so in 2018, it will be the 50th anniversary of this first conference, and there will be another conference that will then have a look at the current space law and at the new challenges. So these are the five treaties, and the first one, the outer space treaty, is the most important one, and that was signed by more than 100 states. The basic, what it regulates is five space freedoms that are very basic, so the freedom to explore outer space, and that can be with a scientific reason, but it can also be without, and therefore, it could also be for commercial exploitation. And the use of outer space would also cover the exploitation, and then there's the freedom of scientific investigation, the freedom of access to all areas, and the access also to outer space as a precondition to get to the celestial bodies. But these freedoms are not without limits, and the very important limit is the no appropriation principle. And that means that no appropriation is allowed by means of sovereignty, occupation, or any use. And this also includes the exploitation. Therefore, when companies would exploit any celestial body, they would not be allowed to appropriate what they find. Then as a downside of the freedoms, the treaty also sets up some space obligations for states, because freedom also means responsibility. So states have to authorize and supervise all non-governmental space activities, so if a private company wants to launch a space object, it has to be registered with the states, and the states have to notify these space objects to a register and also notify them to the United Nations. States have to assume international responsibility and liability for space activities, so whenever damage occurs on the earth, the state is strictly liable and in an unlimited way. And finally, states have to coordinate the use of frequencies and orbits, and that is also very important, because no space object would ever function without any frequencies, because that's needed to communicate. I might add to the frequency thing that is not really undebated. Behind that is the concept of free broadcast. Free broadcast is a typically, I would say, Western concept. It is strictly opposed, for example, by Russia or China. So it's not that clear. We have it in the treaties now, but it is debated. And that is regulated by the International Telecommunication Union, and this union has 193 member states, so basically all member states, all states of the world are member states to the ITU. And in the radio regulations, it is clearly mentioned that here we have another limited natural resource, because radio frequencies and any associated orbits are such a limited natural resource, and therefore they must be used rationally, efficiently and economically, and the member states are requested to limit the number of frequencies and the spectrum used to the minimum essential to provide the necessary services. So here we have another concept of what you can do when you have limited natural resources. Let's see how that applies to what can happen in space. We call that cases, I mean like lawyers do. First, that's our title case. Let's tell the moon like Dave Harriman did. What would happen? Just to add to the science fiction case, a real case that we found, this is the case by a US citizen who claimed that the asteroid 433 with the name Eros was his private property, and then when NASA wanted to land a spacecraft on it, he demanded parking fees. And obviously he never got those parking fees, because this principle that I just explained, the principle of non-appropriation, also applies to individuals, and this covers also the other case from the book. Yeah, I mean, non-appropriation, that's a tricky thing. I mean, if you don't appropriate, but you take away all the richness there is, I mean, what's left might be just the empty thing, and that's the next case. What's about asteroid mining? So that has different implications. One is, I mean, destroying these asteroids to get the iron, to get all the raw materials from there. The second is, it's not really without dangers, because these asteroids that in their flyby around Earth have to be brought into an Earth orbit, otherwise you couldn't get a hold of the material. Yeah, and so we have one solution that was done in the United States that I quoted earlier, this act in the United States. Others say that asteroid mining is completely forbidden, because it's clearly stated in this treaty that I just explained. But then how can you have this US commercial launch act? Well, you could argue that at the time when this treaty was adopted, that was in 1968, nobody really thought of the possibility that this mining would ever become possible, and therefore this case was not regulated. And so you would have a gap in the regulation, and you can fill this gap. Either some people even argue you can just fill it by analogy to the fishing rights. As there's enough fish in the sea, you can also do asteroid mining. And so the United States and Luxembourg would prefer to have an act that clearly states it. There's also a third idea, that's the Moon Agreement that I also mentioned earlier that I had on my slides, but that was only adopted or signed by 16 states, because there's a foundation also for asteroid mining. But it says that the state parties have to establish an international regime to govern the exploitation of the natural resources, and then this exploitation would become feasible. So the next thing is really creepy. That's nano satellites, but again, we saw that on the South by conference. This is a Japanese company called Ale, really promising name, I would say. And they sell bespoke shooting stars. So you can order your bespoke shooting star bonfire for your corporate event, for example, by these small satellites sent into orbit and then brought back and raining space debris down. And the question would be, how can that be? I mean, there should be some regulation, shouldn't it? Yeah, so that would just be a small satellite as there are many other satellites, because a lot of research is done on satellites by universities and also startups are working on these small satellites, because they are very cheap, they are very fast to develop, you can just use off the shelves materials. And so this is really part of the, what's called democratization of space, because it's cheap and everybody can do it. And at the moment, there's no special regime for these small satellites, they are covered by the normal space law and the full regime would apply, so you have to register them. And yeah, so everything applies, that applies to rockets as well. And if you want to get into this business and build your own small satellite, check US web pages, there you have detailed checklists what you need to do. Yeah, so the main thing that I'm concerned with is debris. Obviously, there is some risk of these satellites that we will further clutter the orbits with junk. Yeah, it's already a real problem and you can read many articles about that. There are 750,000 objects or fragments of 1 centimeter or larger in the orbits and more than a million objects, more than 100 million objects that are smaller. And all these, they can explode, they can collide and this could, so this can be called collisional cascading. Yeah, and the cascading thing is really some thing that should be taken earnest. There's many papers on that, this is quite a recent one. The thing is that these particles start, for example, if some disturbance occurs, start colliding in a cascade of ever further fragmenting particles and that would act like a gigantic explosion that might destroy a whole orbit. And there's obviously two things that are fretful in that, these cascading debris, they can also contaminate other orbits and cause huge damage. But more interesting is how would you, how would you differentiate that from a military sabotage operation? Because it's easy to initiate such a cascading collision. So how would you say this was not an aggressive act, for example, of your adversary? And as I said, there is quite some interesting strategic research going on how to prevent that, that accidentally, for example, the US might blame China for sabotaging their orbital objects. Yeah, now for more benign and I would say happy things. This is the last page of my first print of the Man Who Sold the Moon. This is an ad for interplanetary vacation that you could book in 1950. But you might have heard that this is not so far off. This is New Mexico, near a town with the nice title truth or consequence. New Mexico, not without cause, you know, very nearby is the town Roswell. Roswell is of some historic meaning to space travel, not only because the aliens landed there, but more because it was the first site where the US tested the Browns A4 rockets. So nearby is White Sands missile test range and this building is the American spaceport of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. So Richard Branson sells tickets to go into space. So tourism is real. Let's see what that means on the legal side. Yeah, and just to add to that, we also found an article that you can even book in Germany or reserve these space flights and design travel agency is the place to address. And these suborbital tourist flights pose more new legal problems because it's not quite clear whether you would apply air law, space law, both of them or none of them. And while the international community is still arguing about that, the United States again have covered these questions in their act. They have a provision that states that private operators can obtain an experimental permit for testing suborbital rocket launch vehicles if they want to have commercial operations, they would need a license. And then they also state that the space flight participants, that's the opposite to astronauts, so people without a professional training, must be advised of the risks and that would include the safety record of the launch or reentry vehicle because as everybody knows, it is very dangerous or it can be very dangerous and you don't know whether you survive. And so people who want to do it, they must agree to accept these risks and comply with any safety regulations, training medical regulations. I mean, apart from the historic reasons, the funny thing about New Mexico is that New Mexico exempts all companies, all private companies from liability to the passengers of space flight. So it's the only place in the world you can have a company sending people into space without any liability risks. And this is a very good reason to start your business there, I would say. So now let's see, so that that was all what's there already. So let's see what's up to come. Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, the United Nations Space Conference will set up a process to discuss all these challenges that we have just presented and they will have four pillars in the end for a space vision for 2030. And these will be space economy, space for the development of the economy, the space society, the evolution of society and societal benefits stemming from space-related activities, space accessibility, strengthening of national infrastructures and capacity-building also to involve developing countries, and then space diplomacy, building partnerships and strengthening international cooperation in space activities, because without international cooperation, there won't be any good solutions. I mean, yeah, and that's our point now to make our postulates. So what's really that we demand as a society? And that's, we have some more slides then, but to bring it here now. So how would we get where we want to be? How as a society would we shape space in the future? I mean, the first objective should be to maintain these space freedoms, which is not perfectly clear, because of the freedom to access space, if it is tied to economic might. I mean, if you just can go to space if you can afford it, in our view, that would not be fair. So as with all public goods, I mean, we are free to use water, for example, but if we use water, we have to pay for it. And that might be a good regime that we might demand, for example, for the United Nations. And it's very common. I mean, we have that in many aspects of our lives that common goods are charged by a fee. Why not demand from these asteroid mining companies a fair share for society? I mean, society has built the civilization that makes spaceflight possible in the first place. It's not, as we are told, the private endeavor of single entrepreneurs. And so that's really the give back to society what we own, what we owe to society. For that, of course, we need to set up a regime for space mining that should be transnational, like, for example, the ITU is for the use of frequencies. It's no secret that we oppose the appropriation of common goods by private people, at least me always did. So I would really demand that we see for the primate of the public to maintain that, that these ideas of the common heritage of mankind can be maintained even if there is private entrepreneurship in space. And a really interesting and important point is to prevent that. I mean, there is some provisions for military use in space, but this is far from satisfactory. We should fight, go on fighting to prevent a militarization of the celestial bodies and of outer space. Because there's so much to come. So that's the science fiction part. That was all basic, nowadays things. Now comes science fiction. I mean, of course, you all have heard about the Mars mission that's up to come. So there's scientific conferences at Ivy League universities dealing with manned flight to Mars. That's also a nice project. You might have seen that, the tower project, that's a 15 to 20 kilometer high tower. So this is Mount Everest in comparison. And this tower should be used as a launch system. So it can easily launch objects then from this tower to an orbit of, say, 400 kilometers, which is the orbit of the ISS at, I think, a third or so of the costs compared to launching the vehicle from ground. Neil Stevenson, by the way, is the main evangelist of this project. Then we have the famous space elevator. I mean, never of you, no one really has seen that, but I found that that's a children's book of the 1970s. We have the space elevator concept quite elaborate here. We start with a huge space station in geostationary orbit, so really far out there in almost 40,000 kilometers away. And from that to both sides, we build this elevator threads. Here you see helicopter platforms working. And that's how the final thing will look like. Launch system with elevators driving people halfway up to the moon. So, yeah, that's also nice. That's interplanetary society. That's a plan that was recently brought back to people's consciousness by Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking announced that we would start bringing vehicles to Alpha Centauri. That's like four light years from here. That's quite a bit. And this is a plan from the 1930s, I think, already, how that vehicle should look like. And finally, this is a friend of ours, Andreas Vogler. Andreas Vogler is a Swiss architect. He's focusing on design for public buildings and also the interior, for example, of public transportation systems like trains. And he was commissioned to design a city on the moon. So this is the real thing that's going on. We have architects working on a permanent moon base. This city will be called moon capital because there's many cities to come. And this will be the main city. You see beautifully shaped domes for people living here in space. So I think it's worthwhile fighting to keep the moon free so that we all get our share of space. I doubt that we, that we sit here, will be walking on moonshines soon, but maybe our grandchildren also might have the pleasure, but only if we prevent selling the moon. So, and that's our side. And now, happy to tell you more if you have questions. Thanks. Hi. Thank you for the talk. To go back to the subject of asteroid mining. I don't know if you know there has been for years a legal controversy about fishing ships who also can process the fish up until they can. Now, let's transfer that to asteroid mining. So you have spaceships who like travel there and not just mine the asteroid, but also process the materials. Now, how is that applied? Because in the case with the fishing ships, it's, yeah, the fish are basically have the same legal status as if they were brought to land and then processed. That's a very good question. So, so fish are animals and raw materials are different. So, yeah, but the question is, the good thing is, the interesting question is, is the, is the, are these ships regarded as sovereign territories like ships are on earth? That's a very good question. I guess not. Yeah. I guess not. But that's a very good question. Well, it could be like on the ISS. It's not one space object, but whoever contributes to it, that's under their responsibility, basically. So, I guess that could be applied maybe to your case. So, the appropriation would then take place on site by just digging the things into the ship, like it's shown here. Yeah, but there's no sovereign team in space. So, I think that's different. There's a big problem about the audience question. There's why I brought up the fishing vessels is because there was legal debates whether or not the process of processing the fish turns them into something different. So, that the rules would change or if they were applied, as if they were brought to land. Yeah. And I guess you can just have two opinions on that. Either you agree that it changes or it doesn't. And for that maybe the solution has to be found then also at this conference in 2018. I mean, there is, so I think that at least some of the concepts of these asteroid mining companies rely on processing the things in space. So, there is concepts that, for example, are described by Neil Stevenson in Seven Eaves also to break up these asteroids to build orbital structures. So, it's much cheaper to get perhaps, at least theoretically, to get a fly by asteroid and divert that into an Earth orbit and then start breaking it up and build structures there, like huge space stations. Of course, you could never bring so much material to space orbit to build structures like that, but with things that are already in space that's feasible. And of course, then the question would be the processed material, the space station, so to say, who's is it? And that's a very good question. So far, we have two examples. We had the national space stations like Skylab or Mir. We have the ISS now that was born out of budget restraints. In the late Reagan era, it was very limited for NASA, so they asked for international support. At that time, I mean, the Soviet Union went down. It was a good time to do cooperative things. I would say that was really a lucky incident. I doubt that we will see that now easily. I have a question. You mentioned UNI space. I remember UNI space three, 1999. At that time, Germany, but things like the DSA in Japan had not signed this moon treaty. There are five treaties, as you know. And the moon agreement, excuse me, not treatment. What is the status right now? And another question, Germany, because after ISS, there's another global exploration strategy, and there were commitments also every national, Germany, India, China, etc. shall commit to the moon exploration. And Germany also had a national moon program. I don't know what happened to it because of the financial crisis. Do you have any news about this? Thank you. So the moon agreement is in force, but only 16 states signed up to it. Austria is one of them, for instance. But neither the United States, nor Luxembourg signed up to it. Germany did, I think. Yeah. Check it on the internet there. You can see all the states that have signed, and also whether they have just signed it already. That's the second part of the question. It's also interesting. The question of, is there a German national moon program? I mean, yes, because everyone is dreaming of that. But at the moment, as far as I know, there is only the ISA moon program. So if you have... Hahaha! I do know that we have a national moor program. Like India went to the moon, China went to the moon. They are commitment. If once you are committed, you show to the international community that you have the capability to do exploration to other planetary and other bodies like the moon. Germany also was coming. In the Strasbourg, the Stuttgart University, there is one PhD who wrote a great doctor on this program. The point is that implicit in our postulates is that of course we see that we have two kinds of competition now forming. One is the private competition that takes place, the Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and these entrepreneurs. The second thing at the same time that takes place behind that kind of a theater for that is again a national rally for space. That's true. I don't think that's a good thing, but we see that at this moment. For example, you might have heard that NASA prohibited US space vehicles to be transported by Indian rockets. That's one example. There's obviously something going on on the national level too. Let me just correct. There's not ratified the Moon agreement, but Austria has it, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia is an accession country which is quite interesting. The Philippines ratified the Netherlands, Morocco and Chile. We have another question over here. I'm having a slightly far question and is there any thought put for discovery of any life form, complex life form and regulations for it? For example, contact with life form? That's a very good question because that will become important with Mars at least. I don't know if you have seen that, but when the first astronauts returned from the Moon, there was provision taken, they were taken into quarantine for several weeks to see if they would have carried any malicious organism or unknown threat with them. Of course, this is, I think, what everyone expects from a Mars expedition or so. That will take place. I don't have doubt about that. Also the unlimited liability of states for every damage that is done by their space fare I think makes it reasonable to go that route. Nevertheless, there is very few places in space where we would expect life forms. There could be Mars, there could be of course Encliados. So everywhere we see some kind of moisture or so. We haven't detected any sign of a chemical imbalance on any of the celestial bodies yet. You know that even from far apart, every alien would immediately recognize that there is life on Earth because of the oxygen-rich atmosphere. The atmosphere couldn't be as rich in oxygen. It's very reactive, it would over a very short time just react with other elements and go away and become, for example, a carbon dioxide again as we see in the Mars atmosphere, for example. So the Mars atmosphere might look like the Earth's atmosphere before plants were there. And so this is called the GIA hypothesis. You would notice if you see a chemical imbalance like that, that would be a hint of life existing. And we haven't found that yet. So we're not on any of the exoplanets yet, which doesn't say anything that might not evolve then. I mean astronauts come there, change things, maybe like we have seen in many movies, some kind of monstrous organism forms at this moment, of course no one knows. On the other hand, I mean the astronauts, when flying back, they have something like a year to incubate. Hopefully that is sufficient also as a quarantine. We have another question over here. Yeah, and you brought up the subject of fees for the use of space. Very practical question in return. How would we appraise the use of space? So how would we set a cost for the air quotes real estate? Yeah, that's a very good thing. You could, for example, find some kind of auction mechanism. I mean there's lots of examples to set a price for common goods. You could just assign a price tag arbitrarily. I mean these are all publicly listed companies. You can just look into their balance sheets and just see what profits they are calculating and just take a tenth of that or something like that. So there's many, I would say there's many mechanisms where you could set these fees. I think an auction mechanism could make sense. Another question over here please. Anybody else who hasn't asked a question before, you're also very welcome to ask a question too. No, nobody has a question. I just want to make sure you feel welcome. To my followup before, like the outer space clearly defines Article 1, the use of outer space is for the benefit of humankind. Yes. That's the principle and it should be this way. Exactly, that's what we propose. And it will be this way. And everybody is watching over it. And another question was humane. Before you ask your second question, I mean what the benefit for humankind is. However, it is debatable. So there is certainly different approaches to that. I mean you could say that it's an approach of commons that a space should remain a common good open to everyone in every detail. Or you could say, well, private entrepreneurship is also part of the benefit of humankind. Yes. I agree with private entrepreneur, but I don't agree with military. Because this is also the space treaty says explicitly for the peaceful users. Exactly. Oh, yeah, very good. And that is me as not being a law person, I would read it the same way, but Zürich corrected me and said, well, that just means a non-aggressive way. So for example, there is two regulations that are really interesting for national defenses. So there is two things that have had economic impact already over a long time. One is already mentioned, the broadcast. So people are free to set up satellites to broadcast television, for example, or to use that for telecommunication purposes. Of course, that's a good business that has been set up for a long time. And the second is the military use for this is called reconnaissance. So the spy satellites and these spy satellites are perfectly legal. And it's clearly military use. So it might sound like it is not really peaceful, but however, it's not peaceful does not mean no military in legal terms as far as I see it. But this interpretation was done at the time because in 1967, when this treaty was adopted, the United States and the Soviet Union had already launched satellites into outer space for military purposes. And therefore, they had to take this interpretation. Otherwise, it would have been contrary to the treaty that they just adopted. And I think it started from there. And then you also understand that because it's mentioned, no weapons, no nuclear weapons and no weapons of mass destruction are allowed. So that is very clear. And for the rest, yeah, there are also dual use goods and you can use military personnel and military objects. And yeah, you know, this is why I like this picture so much because this is not a map of mass destruction. It's a precision killing weapon. So you know, that's the future of drone warfare in space killing one after the other. So I think we are done. Time is up. Let's end with this beautiful picture of the moon station and thanks everyone for listening. Bye bye. Petrolers in space kill two soldiers at once.
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Space once again is hyped as the next big thing. ISS' astronauts are superstars on Twitter, Mars Rover, Rosetta probe, Philae lander, and the Pluto flyby of New Horizons are landmark publicity events. For the first time, we see also private enterprise in space, ranging from rockets for space transport to exploring economic exploitation of asteroids. But how do we as humankind want space to be conquered? Which line should space law draw between public good and private endeavor?
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10.5446/20700 (DOI)
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3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 The next hour you get to know foreign startups in music tech and they provide musicians with new tools or they change the way we can listen to music and there will be four lightning talks so the speakers will come up and have a talk for ten minutes and afterwards there will be a little discussion so and there you can place your questions. The first talk is from Vanja Steinholtz from Sweden so please give her a warm welcome. Thank you. Hi everyone, very nice to be here in Berlin, this lovely city and at Republica this is such an awesome conference. My name is Vanja and I'm a musician and songwriter. I'm also the head of communication at Soundtrap and Soundtrap is an online collaborative recording studio so it's completely cloud based and it's in your browser and a place where you can be creative and record your music. It works on all devices so it works on your smartphone, your tablet, your laptop and it works on Chrome, sorry Chrome, Android, Windows, Apple, iOS. So this makes it very easy for you to be creative wherever you are and you can open up your music if you have recorded something on your smartphone you can actually open it up on your laptop at home and it doesn't matter what kind of laptop it is and you will find all your music there without sending files back and forth. So this is what it could look like when you open up a DAW. If you're a beginner it might be hard to know if you're supposed to run an airplane or record guitar when you see this. So this is a problem that we wanted to solve. We wanted to make it easy for everyone to make music and we wanted to reduce complexity. So we made this very easy to use and simple interface so that you can start recording your software instruments and audio and play around with our loops. We have about 3,000 built-in loops immediately when you are entering the studio. We also have a collaborative function inside the studio which I will come back to very soon. As a music maker you might come up with ideas on unexpected places like on the bus or when you're out for a walk or at a party with friends. So we wanted to make it easy for you to just capture your ideas and record them instantly when you're on the go and to be creative wherever you are. One thing with making music on your computer is that you can actually make everything by yourself which is awesome but sometimes you don't want to do it by yourself. You might want to do it together with others. So that's why we created the Soundtrap community. We have about a half a million users so it's a very good place to find people to play with all around the world. You can just browse around here and listen to other people's music or if you have a specific request you could create a shout just like Leah did here. So she says, hi, me and my friend Vania want some guitar on our new pop song, Who's In. And Axel sees this shout and he answers and gets invited to the project. So Leah and I and Axel actually shares a project. He records some guitar and I'm at a different place listening to him while he records his guitar and I can see him inside the studio. I can see what he records and we could actually video chat and text chat with each other inside the studio. So everything is in the same window. You could say that it's a combined garage band, Skype, messenger, Google Docs in the same window. My friend Leah, friend and colleague Leah did a video on a collaboration she did in Soundtrap so let me show you that video. Oh, sorry. There she goes again. Come to me now, I'll set you free. See me like I am, I am like you. Cross my fingers now, I'll wait until. And go ahead and do like believers. And go ahead and do like believers. Believers, believers, believers. And even we fall apart, to rescue we know that from the start. Can you feel it? And even we fall apart, to rescue we know that from the start. Can you feel it too? Yes, that's Soundtrap. So all of us working at the office, we're about 10 people now. And we have our office in Stockholm. We're all musicians and we're all nerds. So even though it's an easy to use studio, we got a bunch of layers with effects and synthesizers as well, of course. So there are pretty much to explore even for the advanced user. Just a couple of days ago, we launched our beta version of the app. So before that, we were only available inside the browser. But if you go to App Store, you can download Soundtrap, the Soundtrap app for free and try it out if you want to. So thank you for your attention. Thanks. Thank you, Vanya. And next on stage is Julian Vogels. And he will explain the idea behind Soundtrap. Julian, so please give a welcome. Hi. So welcome to my talk. I start with a question because we have a panel afterwards where we talk more about this question. So how do music tech startups actually disrupt the music business? I think I love the question because there's so much we can actually do. I have studied music technology and there's so many interesting disciplines in music tech where you can actually have disruptive innovation. Also, I believe that the market, the music market is actually quite conservative where the customers actually are always looking for the new thing actually to discover. So in music tech, you have these different disciplines. And I'll give you a little startup idea for every one of them so you get an idea of how much potential there is actually. First of all, in the digital signal processing, think about the next app that transforms your voice, which I don't know how scalable that is, but DSP is kind of like the math of the whole thing. So you need it in every other discipline. Then upcycle acoustics. Think about a system that recommends your music based on the mood you feel or to change your mood, or even an app that actually tunes your headphones exactly to the perfect listening experience because it's based on your personal audio perception. For example, for computation modeling, that's where you bring an instrument to the digital world with all its physical details. Think about a guitar customization tool online where you can build your own guitar and it will sound in the browser exactly how this guitar will sound when it's produced. Or a music information retrieval. That's the guys who make the most money in music tech because they build algorithms for Amazon to recommend music or for any Pandora and all those things. Or a friend of mine, he actually built a system where you sing and there's a virtual band that just plays along in harmony. Then in digital musical instrument design, this is actually my field of expertise. So this is where we reinvent the way how we make music with devices, with controllers. And that's also what applies most to my startup company, Soundbender, where we actually don't have a musical instrument but a musical accessory. I'll show you first what it's actually all about. DMI design is, as it's always, what is important is its three parts. So you have the controller, you have the input side, the sound synthesis, this is the output side and the mapping brings all together. So now these three parts are separate and exchangeable. And that makes it so diverse and so versatile. You can actually make any sounds with any device and you can change them. So working in that field, I gained some key skills that we all could use in Soundbender and that the whole company actually are all musicians. We all love music tech and we do exactly that. So we built electronics with sensors, actuators, we built prototypes, DIY. You have to know about human computer interaction and music, gestures, motion capture, filtering DSP, all those things are important. So what we actually do is the Soundbender pulse. Soundbender pulse is a smart, variable metronome. So it's a music accessory, it's a tool for musicians for performance and practice. It keeps you on the beat and it's powered by vibration. It means that you don't need the annoying click track anymore in your ear. But instead, you just turn it on like this and it will vibrate on your skin and let you still feel the rhythm and also you can connect it to a smartphone, you can even connect multiple of those devices to your smartphone and it all stays in sync. So with this idea we went actually pretty far. Since January we launched and we shipped 5,000 devices worldwide in 74 countries. We have 20,000 app users right now growing and last year we had a big crowdfunding success of 2,000, 250,000 US dollars in pre-orders. We just signed distribution deals for Europe, USA and China and we have a high customer satisfaction. We have a distributed team of 9 people in Berlin, in Hong Kong, where we produce and in the USA, in Los Angeles. So now I just wanted to show you a little video of the actual device. This is the main unit and inside you see there's a big ERM vibration motor that's very, very strong. So it's like 7G strong, that's the unit of vibration. And it's a smartphone is about 1 or 2G so it's very strong and you need that for the instrument. It's controlled by a haptic driver so it's super precise too, it's also very important. And here you have to get a comparison again with the smartphone. As you see you can actually start and stop it by double tapping it. You can also just tap in a rhythm like this. And there's also a wheel on the device so you can just control the companion app directly with the device so you don't need to have the app in your hand. You can then if you're happy with the rhythm that is totally customizable, you can actually start a rhythm in a set list. You can set accents, you can set different subdivisions, so eighth notes or sixteenth notes or triplets even. And you can customize the color of the device and the vibrations or switch the light off altogether if you're for example on stage. So I just wanted to give you some impressions of our journey so far. So we prototype the device, we test it with many, many musicians. Then we went on to electrical engineering and did the molds in China. Then we actually mass manufactured in China and brought the device to the customer. So this is from left to right to the customer's home. And then we got our happy customers who all send us pictures and we grow a community online so that they actually exchange how they use it and what they do with it. And that's actually something that something we want to build upon. So what we, what's very cool about our device is that you can actually always update the software because it's an app and the app can update the hardware. And so what we expand on is this whole online community thing. So in the future you can share set lists, the whole band can organize their tracks in the app. And we also want to build in some algorithm to listen to what you're playing as you're playing it and analyze it and compare it to the match notes. So we can actually tell, well, you were this week you were 80% on the beat, next week you're 90% on the beat and that makes it somehow like a fitness tracker for music. And a little proof that actually small music startups can disrupt the market is that we went to the NAMM show which is the biggest trade show for music equipment this year and we won the prize, the Best in Show and got lots of retailer interest and we grown quickly. So yeah, that's my little presentation of our ID. Thank you Julian. Time for question is later. Now on stage there is Daniel Büttner from Lofeld and he will talk about the best sledge, basled, baselid. Okay, good. Have fun. Hello everyone. Is the mic working? So hi, I'm Daniel. Thanks to the public for having us here. I'm the CEO and founder of Lofeld and we create something called the baselid. But before I dive into the baselid and tell you all about why it's important to feel the bass rather than just hear it, I thought I'll just give you a quick introduction to actually who I am, where I come from, what my background is in music tech, and that will give you a little bit better idea of why we came up with this idea. So my background is actually, I'm technically actually a professionally trained bass player. So I started playing music when I was 10. I started playing piano, did a lot of work in synthesizers, had an Atari to make electronic music. And a few years later when I was about 13 or so, I actually abandoned the whole computer music making and started playing upright bass. One of the driving factors there was that I was really missing this physical sensation of instruments. You know, if you have a guitar in your hand and you plug a string, you can feel that instrument. If you do that on an upright bass, it's a very visual sensation of making music. And I always felt that digital instruments, MIDI keyboards and computers, they didn't really have that. You just press a key on a MIDI keyboard and there's nothing coming back to you as a performer. And I just felt like that's a really kind of boring way of making music. Because the interaction with the instrument is not that interesting. So anyway, I pursued my career as a professional upright bass player, played jazz, classical music, went to a couple of different countries, stayed in Liverpool, in New York for a while, and came back to Germany and started working for a company called E-Magic. I don't know if some people who make music for a long time might remember them. They were acquired by Apple later on. This is now Apple Logic. So this was actually developed in Hamburg in the 90s. And then later after that, when I came to Berlin, I started working for a company called Ableton. Ableton is basically now one of the, I would say, one of the industry leaders in music creation. It's a software company that started making a software for live performance. So it's really streamlined for very quick workflows, really stable environment. You can go on stage and perform music live. But then later on, Ableton Live also moved more and more into the studio. Because people making music in the studio also realized that that live workflow of being really immediate, really fast also benefits them in making music in the studio. While I was working with Ableton, I was basically product manager for instruments, effects, and something called Max for Live. So while I was working for Ableton, I spent a lot of time in music studios. I worked with producers and musicians and just watching them, like looking over their shoulders, how they make music and try to learn how we can improve their music making and sort of seeing where the boundaries are of digital instruments. And as part of that, there was one thing that was really, really apparent. So if you watch someone making music in front of a computer, they literally just sit there with a trackpad and they click in beats and just construct basically music with a trackpad. And I found this to be a very, very non-antuitive way of making music, especially for me coming from more the classical background of music making. And one of the things that struck me is, again, even 15 years later, after I switched from my Atari to an upright bass, I could see people making music on a laptop and it's a completely dead interface to music making. You press a button and there's nothing coming back. There's no string vibrating. There's just nothing, no feeling to you as a performer on what your music does and the energy level of your music. And from that, an idea emerged which was basically, I want to make music perceivable through the body and not only through the ears. Because for me as a bass player, that's one of the most essential things of making music. And anyone here who goes to a club or live concert, you must know that feeling. You stand in front of that big PA and you feel the music throughout your entire body. And I find this, especially nowadays when you look at electronic music, it's such an important part of listening to music. And so we came up with something called the basslet. The basslet is basically a miniature subwoofer that you wear on your arm and it gives you this energy of a live concert anywhere you want. You can basically hook it up to your smartphone, anything actually that plays music. And it takes the music in and it will basically recreate the lowest bass frequencies of music directly to your skin. So when I say it's like a subwoofer, it's basically silent. It doesn't make any sound. It just gives you that visual feeling of music directly into your body. And it's something that probably most of you will just kind of think now, it's a weird idea like how could you actually do that? How could you give people such a full immersive experience in a tiny, tiny device that just sits on your arm? And I think one... So I can't right now demo it to everyone here in the room, but I just want to show you a quick video of someone who tried this for the very first time. This is an old video. It's about one and a half years old. Just when we started, I was part of an accelerator here in Berlin at Beta House and I demoed a first prototype to some people and this is just one of the many reactions we saw. So now he basically keeps playing but we turn the bass off. So there's something really compelling and interesting about the bass that we see over and over again. It's basically you don't know that you need it until you try it. It's something that basically people, you know, once you put it on, the first moment is maybe a little bit weird. People find it interesting and you know, like this guy, he starts smiling, he actually enjoys. Like we write your music, it's a lot more fun, more personal, more intense. The interesting moment is when you take it away. It's a little bit like, imagine there was no stereo music, it was only mono and then you would give someone a stereo headphone for the very first time in their life. They'd be like, oh awesome, it's actually wider, there's somehow more space, more depth to the music, but then you take it away again and give them just a mono signal. There's just no way of going back to that old way of listening to music and this is something that we actually see quite often when people try the bass for the first time. And then, so the basslet at the moment, it looks like that, it's basically a wearable that you wear on your arm. It's wireless, so a lot of people ask us, how does it exactly work? How can you actually hook it up to devices that have just a headphone output? In the beginning, when we developed the basslet, we actually went for an app solution. So we had an app on the phone that would communicate directly with the basslet and we tried this and user tested it and we actually found out that a lot of people, actually here at Republica one year ago, we still had an app that we showed to people and the feedback was basically, wow this is amazing, but I also want to hook it up to my PlayStation, I want to hook it up to my HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, to my keyboard, to my home studio setup. So we realized really, just being on a smartphone, being compatible with a smartphone is really limiting, especially in that space where people might be using any sort of device to listen to their music. So we said the only way we can work around this is to not have a software solution but a plain hardware solution. So we have basically this that we call the sender, it plugs between your audio device and your headphones and it just takes the signal that you're listening to, the audio that you're listening to, takes the bass frequencies and sends it wirelessly over to the basslet. And we also developed something that has extremely low latency, so you can actually feel the delay that you usually have in wireless transmission between what you hear and what you feel. And this means it's out of the box compatible with anything. You don't have to switch, you don't have to learn a new app, you don't have to switch your player app on your phone, but you can also hook it up to any device, which also means you can use it for gaming or for watching a movie or anything actually that has a sound. Oops, let me see. So another thing that's quite unique about us, so we were a startup here in Berlin, we started about two years ago, we are VC funded and we have a team now of about 12, 13 people depending on how you count it. The team is quite unique because it mostly comes out of music tech industry and consumer electronics industry, so we're basically a team of senior professionals with background in Sony mobile, Nokia, Texas Instruments, native instruments, Ableton, E-Magic, Apple. So there are a lot of different people that have been working in the industry, all together probably released way over 70 products if you count all of them together. And in the beginning when we started out working on the basis, there was a pretty big challenge for us which was how do you put a subwoofer into something that size. I mean anyone who knows about tech, about speakers knows that subwoofers are usually the big boxes in the club on the floor that take a lot of power, they have huge membranes, they have to move a lot of mass to get the slow bass frequency going. And when we started working on the basis we actually realized there's nothing on the market that can do that. There's no vibration technology that can actually recreate these really low sub bass frequencies in such a small size and efficiently so that you can actually run it off a battery for many, many hours. After a lot of searching and traveling around the world and looking at universities who basically research in that area, we managed to hook up with a young gentleman who I would say is probably one of the top ten mechanical engineers in haptics and robotics and we're able to recruit him out of the university into our team and together with him we basically developed a vibrotactile technology. So vibrotactile means it's a technology that is just for haptic feedback directly to the skin. So it's something that technically works like a speaker but it creates vibration that is transmitted directly to the skin and we were basically able to develop something that now as we see today is cutting edge technology. It's the most accurate, the smallest and most efficient tech on the market in that space of haptic technologies and something that we're really proud of. Just as a side note, for us it's also interesting because we've developed this primarily for music but we think it can actually be applied to a lot of use cases outside of music like in automobile, if you have steering wheels with haptic feedback, if you have a PlayStation with a game controller that gives you the haptic feedback from the game. There are a lot of use cases for this kind of tech and we think we're basically one of the leaders in providing this haptic technology. The Baselit has now been in development for about two years and so this is basically our last internal prototype. It's a 3D printed body with the straps all homemade basically. We're now doing the whole traveling to China, looking for contract manufacturers and sourcing. We will launch the summer on Kickstarter so if you're interested, if you want to get the early bird discount and stay updated on where we are, then just go to our website or Twitter and follow us because we'll be announcing there as soon as we launch on Kickstarter. Thank you very much. Oh, and if anyone wants to try this, so this is actually a working prototype. If anyone wants to try it, just find us after the panel talk and we'll be around. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. And now we're looking forward to the last of the four to Mikhail Pinto and he will talk about the idea behind WAM. We are music. The stage is yours. Have fun. Is the remote linked? Hi, everyone. My name is Mikhail Pinto. I'm the CEO of WAM. We are music and despite my terrible accent, we are actually based here in Berlin. I started working in the music industry back in 2010 and it really did not take me long to understand that there was a huge imbalance, a big mismatch actually, a mismatch between in one end the music creation and the music consumption actually and in the other end, the music industry or the music business as we call it, negatively speaking, most of the time. And I think we can all agree that consumers and creatives have been first adopters of the new technologies and we understood this with my peers just before. I mean, they are leading the way forward in respect with all music is evolving. And in the other end, you've got these evils, corporations from the music industry that are somehow stuck in all extremely old fashioned and traditional processes and using frameworks of over ages. And if there is one thing that is somehow centralizing and representing very well this gap in between the two, it's what we call the record deals. And I won't go into the details in respect with the record deals themselves, but for those who are not familiar with the record deals, it's basically the set of rules of terms and conditions that rule the relationship between an artist and his or her label. And I think we all been hearing recently more and more artists claiming that record deals are somehow crap, that they lack fairness, that they lack transparency, that they are unbalanced. And at the end of the day, unless you're big shots, you're pretty much in a situation as an artist to either take it or leave it when it's on the table. But why? I mean, let's try to put ourselves into the shoes of these bad guys, and I know it's going to be easier for some of us than for others, but let's try to understand the reason behind the majors and the labels in general being so greedy and tightening the hands on the throat of the artists. Well, first of all, it's fair to say and everybody in the music industry understands this, that launching a new artist, promoting a new artist is actually extremely expensive. The figure everybody is somehow aligned on is that breaking a new artist, as it is called in the industry, costs around $1.5 million. And it's not a figure that is meant to decrease because you can't really save on the costs even though you scale and launch more and more artists. So this is a big issue for them, and mostly it's due to the fact that, again, as I was saying, they rely on extremely old-fashioned frameworks. And on top of that, the return on investment is actually extremely dodgy. I mean, it's a very, very risky business, and it's a business, and we see it at the end of the day as an end consumer, because in order to reduce the risk of these investments, we have less and less diversity in respect to what we are allowed to hear on a daily basis. So why are these independent music artists still craving for a record deal if these deals are not good anymore? Why are they all willing to join the 3,000 ApiFuse, which are lucky enough worldwide to have a signed agreement with a label? Well, because of the money, of course. I mean, and it's normal to say that, of course, signing a record deal provides you with some safety and with the means to achieve your own objectives as an artist. But there are also some additional benefits to signing a deal which are very often not regarded to the right standards. And it's actually the capacity a record deal gives you to enter into the community. Signing a record deal is kind of getting a stamp. It's a door opener, and it's going to provide you with the credibility to open you the doors and to... And when I say visibility, it's not towards the fans, but towards the entire ecosystem, and it will allow you basically to achieve your projects. So how is it to work without a record deal? Well, it's a very, very difficult scenario, and here I won't throw any facts on figures, but the reality is that the chances, the odds of making it happen, being successful, and here, by being successful, I just mean earning a decent life being an independent music artist are very close to zero. And the reason behind this is that as an independent music artist, you're only a part of a gigantic puzzle. A music project actually comprises a lot of different skills and expertise, and if you're on your own, it's very difficult to make it happen. Thankfully, a lot of tools appeared over the past years, and we discovered some of those today, and some of them have been in and around for quite some time, that allow the independent music artist not only to create, but to fund their own projects, to distribute their own projects to the market. But this does not improve the hearts of you making it happen as an independent music artist. And what we believe is the reason behind this is that all these tools, all these great tools, don't get me wrong, they all run as silos. They all run as independent sets of tools with no connection in between. So who's closing the dots, actually? Who's bridging all these gaps, and as an artist, advising me on which tool to use at the best time for me in my career? That's the reason why we came up with WAM. WAM is willing to streamline the artistic development process and to act as the umbrella that will basically close the synapses we've been talking about. WAM is a social network for the business, for the independent music artists, that will basically provide the artists with all the right contacts at the right time, provide them with assistance in respect with what's the best type of content I shall read or hear about, what are the best connections I can make. But technology is only half of the answer. At the end of the day, what we intend to achieve in terms of providing an alternative to a traditional career path for the independent music artists can only be achieved through crowd collaboration. Because we believe that being autonomous and working as an independent music artist does not necessarily mean working on your own. So we believe that the path to success and the capacity for independent music artists to bridge both success whilst actually driving their own career forward is actually in relying into the power of the crowd working. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mikaela. You can stay on stage. We will put on some chairs. And now Julian and Vanya, I hope she's still here. There she is. And Daniel is coming on stage two. You can just sit down. These are chairs. They don't bite. They're very friendly and blue. And the idea was that now we are opening for questions. But they are also the wish to have a discussion about the shifting of hierarchies. We heard something in the last talk. And I have a question right now to Vanya because I was really interested in all of the tools, but this one was very interesting. I think there would be very, there were a lot of bands ten years ago love to have this tool. So how do you think how will, how can this tool change the hierarchies? I mean, how can you change the music industry because there is no studio necessarily anymore, right? Well, I guess the thing that I personally think is the coolest one is that you can create a virtual band and be, like, have your band members all over the world. And you can have completely different experiences in music and, like, just meet up online and do something together. Then, of course, it's a tool for publishing your music as well. But still it's the problem that we heard about here is how do you find the listener. So that connection is still, I guess, that's the big, like, the big thing to solve right now, to find the listener and find, like, your alternative spots in the music business, I'd say. Yeah, I think actually what I like about your idea is the whole connectivity. So, like, you connect people but you also connect, like, technology. You have apps inside your system, you have all this, everything's connected. And I think that's one key, one key thing you have to do if you want to disrupt the music business because, frankly, when I was at the NAMM show, I didn't see that much innovation. And the most innovative things and the one that most of our customers actually ask us to is, can I connect it to Ableton Live? Can I connect it to a studio? Can I connect it to my MIDI pedal? Can I connect multiple devices to one phone? Can I connect multiple phones? And all this is very important because music is about collaboration. And it's what you just said, right? And so, yeah, this is one of our most important roadmap developments is that we just release also a Mac app. We can sync it up to whatever. I would say actually in terms of the democratization of music and music listening versus music creation, it's interesting that technology has really made a big push towards democratization. Even like companies like Ableton that I mentioned earlier on, their mantra is they want to democratize the recording studio. So 15, 20 years ago, as a band, if you wanted to record an album, you would go into a studio and you would maybe pay 10, 15,000 euros just to rent the studio, just to have access to a computer or a tape machine and microphones. And I think the modern laptop basically has removed all of that. As a young band, if you don't have the budget, you just need someone in your band that has a laptop and you can run some software and you can actually record at a quality that is equivalent to something that you would get 15 years ago at a studio. However, so that's the music creation part, right? Then when it gets into monetization, so if you, as an artist, if you actually want to have access to distribution channels, it's interesting that there, I find, is still the biggest bottleneck, even if there's streaming services like SoundCloud or Spotify where technically you should have access as a young artist or band to distribute your music. It's still heavily controlled by record labels that really push their own agenda and their own artists. And so I find the whole music creation, like idea to creation, to production, is basically completely democratized. You can create any production you want at any level with really, really little budget and you don't have to depend on record labels to give you a big upfront payment. But when it comes to distribution, that's basically where I think the democratization is not quite there. Well, I mean, just to jump on what you just said, there are actually like great services out there that provide a window for the independent music, I mean, for any artist in general to release his creations and to sell these creations with his fans and with the audience in general at the price they actually name. So if they want to sell their track at 1,000 euro, they can. And I won't advertise on all these solutions, but there are some tools out there that allow you to do so. But that does not solve the visibility issue, obviously, how to stand out in the middle of the thousands and thousands of artists that can use these tools. Just to add one more thing, I mean, what's interesting also with music creation or the music industry is actually quite a big equivalent to, for example, us as a technology startup or as a hardware startup where, for example, we have much more access now to technologies like 3D printing, for example, where you would say 15 or 20 years ago, we couldn't actually develop this. It would be way too expensive to do something like that. And so it's like the music industry isn't the only place where creation has been democratized and there are new technologies that basically enable anyone to jump in and create something on a base level that is really, really professional. But then again, also for us as a hardware startup, then getting into distribution and competing against the marketing power of someone like Beats by Dreho. So that's basically yet another level that you have to master. And I think for artists it's the same. You can create something really, really good. But then if you have to market it and build up an audience, that's basically where now the really hard work is. I think it's really interesting about that democratization of music and we talk about that a lot at Soundtrap as well. And I mean, if you compare music to other art forms like photo, for example, that has gone so much further than music. It's like everyone is on Instagram and everyone uses their phone to take photos. And I guess sometimes that might be a slow process because it's not 100% just good for the professionals to actually invite the whole world to do the things that you have done for your whole life and really been practicing hard to get good at. And then suddenly it's so easy to do it. But then it's good for the world. So I hope that this will happen for music as well. I mean, we're on our way. But do you really think it's about easy? Because I think there's a big difference between democratizing, let's say the technology or the facilities you need to record music and making music easy. Because from my experience, I would say music will never be easy. If you want to make really good music, no matter what tools you have. I mean, if there was something like Instagram for music and there are actually some tools out there like the OneNote Wonders where you download an app, you press a button and then something really magic comes out. But then 5, 10, 15 or 100 people use it and at that point it becomes completely ubiquitous and it's of no interest to a listener anymore. But it might be with a big worth for the maker, the music maker still. I mean, that's the big difference, I think. Even though it's still like, you know, to be like a professional violinist or something, you will still need to practice. And I guess what we're talking about here is also the technical difficulties. Exactly. Like to make it easy to record, for example. And then you might be a very, very professional musician, of course, anyway. Even though you're not and you just want to play around with loops, for example, it will sound quite good. I mean, better than before you had the loops and you might enjoy it yourself as a music maker. So it's basically what you're saying is basically removing, so the music will always be requiring a certain level of expertise or inspiration, I would say. But what we're trying to do is basically reduce the level of complexity on the technical level. So for example, if you make music on a laptop with, you know, something like a Rashband or Life or Logic or whatever you use, having these technical layers, like you have to load plugins, you have to navigate browsers, you have to basically deal with all that complexity of, you know, pushing the right buttons at the right time. And this is basically what separates you from being creative because, you know, this is actually something that we've seen at Ableton a lot when people had creative ideas and they just want to record them right away. And then you start the computer and then maybe the computer tells you, I want to update something and then you actually need to wait for another minute until the computer updates something. Then you start the software to make music. And then that software tells you, I want to update something or some plugin crash or something else went wrong. So there's a lot of technical complexity and technical layers in between basically between you and your music. And I think this is basically where it's our obligation as technology companies that create, that build something for people to make music to try to reduce those layers as much as we can. So that, you know, as a performer, like as a bass player, for example, if I have an idea, I just pick up the bass and I play. I don't have to reboot anything. I don't have to update anything. And I think that's, for me, that's one of the few areas where laptops are really struggling to keep up with, to have that immediacy of a hardware, of an acoustic instrument, I would say. Any more questions from the audience? Anything? Thank you. I'm not on the music market, but on audio post production for movies and stuff. And I do work there sometimes with open sound libraries, and which is quite an idea, a little bit like your idea with creating music, but I always have two problems there. One problem is that it's really hard to find the right sound you're looking for. And the second problem is that if you find the right sample, you have issues in the quality, because many people are recording their sounds with iPhones and stuff. And it just sounds not like recorded with professional stuff. You have issues with noise and stuff. And so how do you prevent getting too much of this low quality within your app so that the good stuff will get lost in between? So first of all, we don't have an open library inside the studio. We don't have like, I mean, we might have in the future, but right now it's not like possible to add your own loops or anything like that. So it's very, like, we have our professionals doing the loops. But maybe you meant more like in the community? Yes, okay. So we have moderators who picks up stuff that they think are good and adds them on our like featured list. And then of course, as on any other like SoundCloud and similar sites, it's up to the listeners to like see how many plays it gets. But still, I mean, you're always free to publish your songs. So it will be high and low in the Explore field there. Yeah. I have a question concerning WAM because I didn't understand how the umbrella works. Could you elaborate on that bit? Sure, definitely. Well, I mean, not entering too much into the technical aspects of our solution. So our ambition is really to get to know our users by assessing and analyzing and qualifying their behaviors and in order basically for us to assess what we call internally the music, the artistic maturity. And we basically leverage on all the inputs, all the data that we have available from the different social networks that our users connect to the platform. And we also assess the behaviors of the users in our platform so that we better understand who we can put them in touch with and which type of content will be relevant for them at this moment in time. Because for example, let's say I'm a jazz singer and I'm looking for a jazz guitarist, I'll look for a different type of jazz guitarist depending of how long I've been into the market, depending of the music genres, I'll look for a different type of jazz I like. So we're going to compare if we have two profiles to recommend you, for example, as a potential business partner, as a potential business matching for you, we're going to use the data that we get from both your Facebook accounts for example, and there are strong probabilities that if you've both have been to the same concerts three years ago that you like the same bands that you did somehow the same type of search is using hashtags or whatever data we again we have available about both of you, I mean, using this data and qualifying this data will be able to rank these profiles according to the one that could be the best potential match for you. And it's the same for the type of opportunities we're going to present you with is going to be the same for the type of educational content we're going to push to you. Any other questions? Anything you'd like to say? I mean, maybe, I mean, just, just, well, the thing I've, what I think we all have in common is that we want to shake the hierarchies definitely in the music business, we want to bring more diversity and we want to bring more people to the stage. I mean, this is everything we have in common is when we talk about simplifying technology when we talk about crowd collaboration, it's all about giving opportunities and giving more people the capacity to go out there and make it happen. So seems to be a good point. And good as finales what. Thank you very much for the talk. If you want to try out the gadgets, I think you can just come here. Best love, please.
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Start Ups are stirring up the field of music production and creation, they make new tools and instruments or develop apps for musicians networking and colaborative composing.
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10.5446/20704 (DOI)
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Welcome to the session which has been initiated by the BMZ, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. We are reshuffling a bit the program. We were initially planning to welcome the Parliamentary State Secretary, Mr. Silverhorn, to give an introduction to this session from the perspective of the Ministry, but he has to be excused. For now he might still make it, but we will start with a discussion, stopping the brain train in developing countries through entrepreneurship. That's the topic of this session. There has been a lot of focus on migration and the refugee situations over the last month or year, let's say. There are approximately 250 million people living outside their countries as we speak, out of their countries of origin, migrating for different reasons. At the same time though, there is a lot of new stuff happening in a lot of countries where people migrate from. So there is a new startup and entrepreneurs is seen passing in some of the countries. And this is what we want to look into a bit closer today. And we are very, very honored to have three of those great entrepreneurs from Kenya, Egypt and Morocco here today to share with us their experiences of setting up their initiatives and doing great work in their countries. So please a warm welcome. So we have from Egypt's largest summit that connects entrepreneurs and resources from the MENA region and Africa to bringing the collaborative economy to Morocco to managing a hub for technology innovation in Kenya. Great expertise here on stage today. And I will briefly introduce, and I will sit down now with you, each of you. So we have Abdel Hamid, Sarah, and I hope I pronounce it well. Abdel Hamid is the founder and CEO of RiseUp, the Middle East and Africa's top and biggest entrepreneurship summit with around 5,000 attendees from 52 countries. And before he founded RiseUp, he worked at Injas Egypt where he helped creating the first startups pipeline in all junior achievement countries worldwide. He's also a young global shaper, a network of young people under 30 who are exceptional in their potential achievements and try from all over the world. Wow. So, okay. Okay. We are flexible, of course. So as I just mentioned, our state secretary, Mr. Silverhorn, was a bit delayed, but he's here now. So I would like to welcome him and give his introductory speech before we continue with the discussion or start the discussion. Thank you. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen. Now, so thank you for your introduction to this panel already. Hello, I'm Roy Kham. We are proud to be here, I think, for the third time at the Republika, which is a unique event, not only for the BMZ and for Germany, but for all the world, because it brings together thousands of free thinking, unconventional people who engage in dialogue with one another and who are found of inspiration. We want to make use of your creativity to be frank for our development cooperation. Digitalization in particular is a topic where we need and we want to explore new avenues and create new partnerships. That's why the BMZ was also represented at the CBIT Digital Trade Fair for the very first time earlier this year. We invited 13 startups, especially selected from developing countries, to present their business ideas at the trade fair and to get into contact to German and European companies. Therefore, it's for me only natural that we are once again represented at the Republika this year. Development cooperation is not just work done by development workers or in development organizations in a more traditional manner. It's certainly not the work done by development policymakers like me. Effective development is when expertise is brought together, including via channels and pathways that are outside the mainstream. Just 15 years ago, three quarters of all internet users lived in industrialized countries. Today, it's almost the other way around. Two billion of three billion internet users worldwide are from developing and emerging economies. This is causing upheavals in every sphere of life. We development policymakers would be behind the times if we did not attempt to make use of this most powerful force for change. One topic that is very high on the agenda in Germany right now, a topic that will continue to occupy us in the future as well, is migration and displacement. Every day, people are leaving their homes because they hope to find a better life in a different country. And unfortunately, all too often, they are also forced to leave because that's their only chance to survive. There are many reasons why people decide to migrate. A lack of prospects in their country of origin is one and great differences in living conditions and income between different parts of the world are another. Digitalization has made these differences visible to the whole world. We can see this effect every day in social media. And by the way, I think this has really changed in recent years. This is new that so many mobile phones are spread across the world, in particular also in African countries with 500 million mobile phones in Europe, 700 million mobile phones in Africa, more telephones than toilets in Africa. And this has changed the world because what we are experiencing here in Europe or industrialized countries is sent to across the world everywhere and makes our planet a big village. In my ministry, we are working to create programs so that more people will once again have a reason to stay in their homes and will have prospects for their future. First of all, we are tackling the root causes of displacement in the countries of origin, including in the home countries of our panelists today, that is in Egypt, Morocco, and Kenya. We want to create prospects for the future in these countries. And we have launched three special initiatives and are working through them in the Middle East and North Africa, in West Africa, and in the Ukraine. Over one billion euros is being provided for ongoing projects to help refugees directly. And we have set up a cash for work program, for example, through which 50,000 mainly Syrian refugees will be found work in this year only. In many cases, however, migration also means returning home again. That's why the second way that we are helping is with the reintegration of returnees. Digital transformation can help here. The BMZ is one of the first donors to have recognized the potential. The possibilities of digital networks are huge, and they mean that people can do their jobs independently from their own homes. The ideas here reach from virtual careers fairs to app-based info portals and personal digital coaching programs. For example, we are supporting a pilot project together with a Berlin startup here on Open Higher Education. I just had contact to this project at the CBT Fair in February. Its aim is to enable refugees in Jordan, for instance, to gain access to tertiary education through e-learning. This is a very promising example for young refugees coming here to Germany or to Europe and giving them a chance to use the time they have. We recently issued a toolkit, another example with inspirational project ideas. Our intention was to provide input for further discussions about such digital approaches in development policy and to offer a roundup of the instruments that can be used for digitalization. A few copies of the toolkit are available here at the front. Another example is our cooperation with Better Place Lab. The Better Place Lab is a German think tank that is part of Germany's biggest digital donation platform, Better Place.org. The lab is currently in the process of conducting a study on the digital needs of refugees in Jordan, Greece and Turkey. The findings of the study will be used to generate ideas for development cooperation support. The BMZ uses existing commitment in projects all over the world. However, particularly when it comes to new innovative ways of providing support, we also want to work with new players and with social startups. Startups are setting new trends and entrepreneurs are creating jobs. A study conducted by the OECD in 2013 showed that more than half of all new jobs that were created in the past 10 years were created by companies that had been on the market for less than five years. That is also meant to be our topic today. The panelists and the organizations and projects they are representing in our session today have some very interesting approaches to show you. I'd like to briefly introduce our guests, but maybe you already did it. You started already. You introduced Rise Up, founded by Adel Hamad Sharara. This is one of the most important entrepreneurship summits in the world. It brings together thousands of entrepreneurs from the tech startup and business scene from the Middle East and Africa, with a few two creating the synergies and forming networks. We share, I hope I pronounced it correctly, is one of many innovators working together on important topics to do with the collaborative economy. Topics that are also highly relevant in the context of Republica, ranging from the government to open knowledge and crowdfunding. Asma Gheira, who herself moved from Morocco to Paris, introduced this approach into the Middle East region. Jessica Colasso, one of the creative brains behind Brave Venture Labs and IHUB in Kenya, is focused on supporting African entrepreneurs looking to establish new tech startups. For the German Development Ministry, your thoughts on the following questions are of great interest, if you allow me to give you some of our hopes and expectations. How can development cooperation support entrepreneurship and the startup culture? What is the role of diaspora entrepreneurs and transnational networks when it comes to making use of the potential of migration and to what extent our digital technology is important for you in your projects? I'm looking forward to your panel discussion. I'm certain that it will provide inspiration for everyone. Just before I conclude, let me invite you to our next Congress on ICT for Development. ICT for Refugees is the title on Tuesday, the 31st of May in 2016 here in Berlin. Some flyers are available here with our staff. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm looking forward to fruitful discussion, hopefully many new ideas and concepts we want to support and want to implement in our development policy. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Okay, thanks a lot, Mr. Silberhorn. I will not go back into the introduction in that case. I think what is important to emphasize is that we have three people here who have set up and are running also since years. Great initiatives or actually work beyond initiatives that has been initiated, is rooted in the countries of their origin and stems from within the countries themselves. I guess that's an important thing to mention. Let's go straight into the discussion then. I think it would be nice if you could maybe, each of you briefly introduce like how your work, your initiatives actually started, like what was the driving motivation behind them? Maybe we start with you. Hi, I'm Abdelhamidam from Egypt, Cairo. You all know in 2011 there was an Arab Spring and that spread a lot in Egypt. Post the Arab Spring there was a huge buzz and huge drive for a lot of young people at my age to start businesses and start startups that solve the current existing social and economic problems. For that we needed an ecosystem of resources that actually supports these startups between investors, accelerators, incubators, corporations, government support, media and culture and policies and all the needs and resources for startups. We collectively with the ecosystem founded RiseUp which started off as a large entrepreneurship conference with 2,000 people in downtown Cairo in 2013. Currently we're near 5,000 attendees. It's a very global event that works with more than 50 countries all over the world. We have attendees from more than 50 countries and the main focus is how can startups get the most benefit from the resources existing around them in the men and the region ecosystem or even beyond. We work with accelerators, incubators in Silicon Valley and in Berlin and in London and Copenhagen and Sweden and Dubai and everywhere else so that they get better access and no one really kind of monopolizes the startup movement there. It's a very inclusive and neutral entity. So we work with everyone who drives value and we're not really government, neither corporate nor investor related. We work with all of them. So it's a platform in that sense and the values are driven from what happened in the 18 days in Tahoe Square which was great times. That's it. We're currently working on developing new things to actually accelerate this movement forward. One of them is the city to city partnership and that's starting with Berlin. Thank you. Jessica, you had been with IHAP, Digital Innovation Hub in Nairobi from the very first moment but recently actually left to found the brave venture labs. What was your motivation behind that? What made you do that? I guess quite big step. Hello. I'd like to say entrepreneurship is about taking risks and it's not been conventional and not been conventional by sitting at a panel and telling your story so I'll not be conventional. What motivated me to start Brave Venture Labs starts from a story. Ladies and gentlemen, Africa's youth is about one billion, a sixth of the world's population. Over 70% of Africa's youth of Africa's population are youth. People sitting here, three people here, people in the group are part of this youth and are here to revolutionize this industry. It starts from a story. It starts from Brave Venture Labs but let me take you back to 2007 and 2008. At that time I was a student studying computer science at the University of Nairobi. I got an opportunity in 2003 to study in Canada and I got an opportunity to study in Nairobi where I was born. I chose to study in Nairobi. Why? Because I saw opportunity and I knew that if I stayed I could make change and yes, being there at the right time did happen. At the university I met some of the world's best professors like Nathan Eagle who was the invited as an adjunct professor and started the eProm program from Nokia and I learned how to do mobile programming. Two years later I developed a wireless mapping service in 2007, the first in a mapping application that would show points of interest around Nairobi. In 2007 and 2008 we all know what happened in Kenya, the post-selection violence. What happened? Arab Spring. That right there was an opportunity for the young people like me to actually tap into this opportunity and use their skill sets. Bloggers on the ground like Eric Hirshman, Juliana Routich, Ori Okolo, rallied together and what could be built in weeks was built in days by who? None other than the youth. The youth who developed their skill sets at universities who developed their skill sets on their own. They were putting their skill sets to good use and they developed the Ushairi platform in a matter of days. There was a media blackout in 2008 and through Ushairi information there was an information flow by using the power of the internet and the power of the youth with apps skill sets. But you have to get people who have the right mindset to disrupt and the leaders at the right positions to disrupt. And these same leaders a couple of years later, 2008 and 2009, Eric Hirshman and I set up the iHerb to give them a home where they could call it the technology hub in Nairobi. Where they could come on a frequent basis every day, have meetings, meet up and give in rise to what we call now in East Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Silicon Savannah. Five years later, ladies and gentlemen, we did know that we would be starting the startup revolution. And being in this space for over five years, I am passionate and passionate about talent, young people who have potential. In August last year, I met a very humble gentleman called Ibanga Umana who inspires me. Who is now my co-founder and started Brave Venture Labs because talent is global, opportunities are not. At Brave, we create opportunities for talent everywhere. We want diaspora people to come back to their home countries and give the knowledge to the people in their home countries. We want people in this group to share with each other. Through Brave, we are building a global network where diaspora connections and global connections can be made through entrepreneurship for young people. Talent is everywhere, opportunities are not. Here, we are here to create these opportunities. Let's do that, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Jessica. Asma, for you, it's also a story of having grown up in Morocco, living in Paris, but having decided to work back in your home country or better to say in your home region since you are actually working in various countries in the Minerals. What was your main motivation to do that? Yes, definitely. It's kind of hard to go after you. I'm going to be very conventional and sit on my chair. The thing is, I'm the opposite of your case because I left Morocco with the idea of never at 18 years old and I never wanted to come back. I started there and started working in a consulting company and so on. Then I just got bored and started working more and more with innovative communities, with B-share and other things in Paris and globally. By seeing that and by traveling a lot, I realized how important it was and how dynamic this creative community were. I wanted to bring that back in Morocco, actually, because initially I wanted to work for development institutions and so on, but after an experience that I realized it was not dynamic enough. I found all the innovation and welfare change in the different entrepreneurship communities and groups, in the collaborative economy structures and so on. I decided to organize events, start to raise awareness, connect people, especially in the collaboration topic, because I don't know if you would agree, but in our region, I'm not very familiar with Sub-Saharan Africa, but more with the whole Middle East and North Africa. We have a strong initial culture of collaboration that we still found in rural areas and so on, but that is completely lost in the business world and in cities. By seeing how it has been growing for five or more years now in Europe and in the US, I wanted to bring these concepts and ideas back and connect the different people around just to make them aware, to make them experience that collaboration is still possible, that it can be a promising business model and that we have to trust each other for that, which is kind of the biggest challenge for me in the region right now. Thank you, Esma. I think we have three points which is really like there is talent and potential everywhere. It's about having the opportunity and the space to live it. A lot of times that happens when there's a moment of challenge, of crisis, that people actually rise up and take action and feel empowered to do so and giving that opportunity, providing a framework for that in that moment. This is where you guys are actually having your heart beating, I guess. The other aspect is the aspect of collaboration. It's about bringing people together to achieve something big. Looking at that, at your work more like zooming in inside of the countries, what is the main situation of entrepreneurship and so what are the main challenges or obstacles you're dealing with? We'll take the round like this again. We're not a conventional entrepreneurship conference, so basically it started within times that you shouldn't organize a conference with the, so streets were blocked, there were tanks everywhere, there was people protesting everywhere and this, overcoming this, gave the whole ecosystem this kind of drive and energy that it's a resilient ecosystem. I think this is from, I'll start first with the opportunity side. It's not a conventional startup ecosystem. It's not, the drive is not just a business itself. There's a very strong drive to become resilient, so basically everyone stemming out of this movement is there to stay or trying to stay further. I think the first opportunity is you have a cult and a movement around entrepreneurship. Second opportunity is a very young movement, so usually founders are fresh grads or people who had two or three years of experience after university and that's 50 or 60% of Egypt's population that are under 30. The third opportunity is it's getting and getting more global, so because of the location and its attachment to Europe and to Africa and to everywhere in the world, they get access to local resources and global resources. So many of the VCs that invested in the most successful startups in Egypt were actually from London, Stockholm and the US. 500 stars, one of the most important exciters in the world, just invested in 10 startups over the past two years in Egypt. From the challenge side, definitely instability is a challenge from a political and, I would say, regional side which shies away investors that are intending to invest in the region. This is one. However, as I'm saying, there's an equivalent or equilibrium for that which is the resilience of that space. The second one is very, very old laws. So I studied law and international law and most of the Egyptian laws that govern business are 50 or 60 years old. So I imagine now with all the tech disruption, how can you start a startup with all these old laws and how can you get investment and how can you invest shares between you and your partners. The third challenge, which is changing a lot as the cultural side, so there's a huge gap between the older generation in Egypt and the younger generation. The older generation is very conservative, conservative. They don't like change. They're a big part of the hinder against what's going on in terms of the revolution. And the younger age is actually all about getting out, change, doing stuff, meeting new people, traveling, and change for them is the only constant. So this kind of clash between two generations is still one of the hinders for the ecosystem as well. Thank you. Jessica, how is that in Kenya? Do you see parallels or where do you see other aspects actually? Well, I see a couple of overlapping challenges and opportunities. And I'll definitely say when it comes to entrepreneurship on a policy level, we still do have very archaic laws in Kenya. And some of the entrepreneurs need to collaborate with government officials to actually educate themselves on some of the policies and also government educating the young generation and the entrepreneurs on this concept, especially in the hardware space. An example is Brick, the internet backup. How many of you know about the Brick? Sure of hands. Yeah, BRCK. When they were in their stage of actually, Eric did launch it at the National Republic, I believe, a couple of years ago. And when they were actually doing prototyping, like components which are like $5, when the input, they need to pay tax like about 10 times. So very archaic laws around what ICT means. So we need to have like a bit of amalgamation with these two stakeholders so they can be informed of like what needs to work where. Another challenge I do see is the copy-paste model. Silicon Savannah, as they call it, is not Silicon Valley or startup nation. They're key ingredients of a startup ecosystem that you can replicate but not copy. In the sense that, let me talk about this talent but there's a skill set. The skill sets and compare Israel to this. Israelis are very technically apt. On the Kenyan skill set, they are apt but they're apt at very specific skills. So it's not a copy-paste model where you can actually take technology from one country and copy it into a developing country and start a startup. You have to understand the factors in the environment. On the opportunity side, I mean, what has happened over the last eight years in Kenya has a lot to do with different stakeholders and this goes all the way from government, private sector, civil society and startups. Let me start with the government. At that time, we had a champion in the ecosystem called Professor Bitange Demo and he pushed to actually create policies around data and policies around the use of fiber. Right now, Kenya has a couple of obstacles coming in from the port area and at least fiber in the major cities. I remember in 2009, it was interviewed by a couple of international media, CNN and BBC and asking, with all this bandwidth, what are you going to do now that you have faster internet? Government actually has done its part to actually push for faster internet but not necessarily that the cost has gone down. The other opportunities that do exist is from private sector. We have seen over the last five years, major companies like IBM research setting up their headquarters in Nairobi and bringing very specialized skill sets into the country. Over 50 researchers from all over the globe are coming to live in Kenya and it's really good to tap into this component. The other opportunity is when the IHUB was set up about six years ago, there has been a sporadic mushrooming of over 120 tech hubs across Africa to actually indulge the young entrepreneurs to get into entrepreneurship and tap into the opportunities. The challenge to that is, and I like to say this from an activist, a lot of you know Ori O'Collough. Ori O'Collough is a political activist in Nairobi, in Kenya and she's one of the co-founders of Ushairi and she does mention that you can't entrepreneurship yourself out of everything. Entrepreneurship is not necessarily the solution to everything. Sometimes you actually just need to fix things on the governance level and this calls for various leaders in the space is looking at the opportunities and the policies while you're in that term. What can you do better? How can we work more efficiently? So it's not about just creating startups and getting the business going but I think it's more about, we talk about collaboration and we talk about partnerships. How can we actually create more tangible actionable partnerships that can be measured and said over the five year period, this is what we did for our city and for our country in terms of development. We're already running short on time. Thanks a lot. I think we do see generation gaps but not only within civil society but also between institutions and those institutions that actually set the frameworks, legal frameworks for a lot of things and those initiatives and new forms of organizing. But the technology aspect became very emphasized here. Asma, you work in various countries but the actual connection between communities plays a big role. How would you describe the role of digital technology in your work and how did the rapid increase of opportunities change or improve the work you guys are doing? Well, it's not a surprise that digital technology is kind of revolutionary especially since most of the population in our region is very young but in the case of Morocco for example and in many developing countries, Morocco has one third of its population who is illiterate. So basically you have different types of challenges that you need to address as a change maker, as an entrepreneur and so on. You cannot disconnect your will to innovate and to start a business and so on from the social impact part. And digital technology and social networks and so on and new media enabled actually this youth to connect online where when it was not able to do it offline for example due to mobility issues or so on and of course to create projects that help. For example, in Palestine there is a very interesting woman, Abira Abouait who created a freelancer platform basically because she lives in Bethlehem and when you're in this region you cannot, you just can't move especially if you're a woman because there are security problems and a lot of women in the region are very well educated. They go to university more than men more and more and they just cannot work. So in that case being able to start a business online is a very powerful tool. And in terms of the other point it's just self-organizing. You have more and more grassroots projects like for example empowering rural areas as well. We have Anu which is a very interesting project run in the south of Morocco. Basically it's kind of an Etsy but working with craftsmen in the rural side of Morocco. So basically the artisans are able to use their mobile phone with very simple technology that has been made specifically for them, post their pictures on the platform and then they're self-organized with it and co-operative and so on. This would not have been possible with digital technology but my point is that it's not enough and I think you can confirm maybe. Thank you. Yeah, you mentioned before the aspect of city collaborations and indeed good that you mentioned rural areas because yeah, context matters we all know and you have all mentioned that what works in one place doesn't work in the other and what works in urban areas in your countries might be an extremely different story in other places within the countries. So how do you for instance in your work like look into scaling and diversifying in an inclusive way? I think that speaking on fresh ecosystems don't tend to revolve around countries in either continents. They revolve around the smallest governance which is the city. So in Germany you'll find Berlin and then other cities are different in terms of ecosystem. Even the US, Silicon Valley and then you go to Detroit you have a totally different ecosystem that is actually stemming from an economic challenge. In Egypt as well Cairo and then other places. So I think this hubs thing the concentration on very small ecosystems that are tending to scale the potential of collaborating between these ecosystems and actually when we're able for example if a startup in Egypt is able to raise funding from Kenya and then basically scale in Morocco or come for mentoring in Berlin with the ease of law of communication and transportation this is the ideal world of startups who are going to live in. Startups are no longer located or centralized around one hub. They don't even we're talking about how to prevent brain drain. They don't even drain towards one place. If you're a telephonic or one of the companies in Spain did the research they asked millennials 70% of them said we want to start startup and most of them like 90% said we don't really care where it is. So it's going to be the next trend that anyone will start their own company anywhere in the world depending on the need of that business and depending on the resources that ecosystem will drive. So ideally I would love to see Cairo collaborating with Nairobi, with Casablanca, with Berlin, with Silicon Valley and so on. Thanks a lot. I would like to soon also give space to the audience to actually ask questions to you but before we do that and so we have various people from the ministry from the development corporation actually sitting here and who are very keen to know of course like what can the development corporation do to best support your initiatives and not only your initiatives but support the startup and entrepreneur scene in countries such as yours on a longer term. There's a very clear cut answer for this. Government and development corporations are usually best when they work with the local partners. So basically when they catalyze the ecosystem not try to implement or build an ecosystem themselves because as our colleague here said it's a cohesive ecosystem. There's a government, corporations, investors, media, universities and each has its own role. The role of a catalyst from the government side and from the development corporation side is usually the best if they're able to find one neutral entity where they can actually gather the whole ecosystem in one round table and speak about the challenges and how they can do so by catalyzing that through resources either their networks or their funds or their even presence at some of the points catalyzed that but implementing is I haven't seen until now one strong ecosystem where the government is the main implementer in the 21st century at least. Jessica. I'm actually really pondering about the term catalyzing and I've heard a lot about a lot of collaborations the way we want to catalyze the growth of entrepreneurs and what I do say is you just do it experiment and boldly prototype the problems. So come down to the level of I am not in government, I am not in the development, I am not an entrepreneur. We're all smart people in one room going to one direction solving a problem. If we do that I think then we're going to towards something tangible because when we start putting all these processors and prerequisites around us we start creating a box around us. You see this line here? We start creating a box around us. Let's get rid of the box. If we want to collaborate with each other what do we want to do here at Republica? We want to disrupt, we want to tap into the 70%. How are we going to do this? These opportunities. How are we going to create jobs? How are we going to tap into the digital rise? Are we going to give money? Are we going to create infrastructure? Talk to the people on the ground, the champions on the ground, they know they have the answers but let's not leave it at conversations. Let's do something for three months. If it worked, what worked, let's scale it. If it didn't work, what didn't work, let's experiment again and let's do it. These are the values of brave. Be passionate about what you're doing. Experiment boldly to unleash the best in yourself for the better of the humankind and the world. Your true calling is here when you're doing something when you're really happy. I cannot express at the moment how joyous I am doing brave because it's helping young people, building companies in Africa. Thank you. Asthma. Yeah, I always go like this. I'm sorry. Terrible. Try to stand up. I have to stand up. Okay. Now I have two mics so I can testify about Morocco. Well, having worked, I'm going to sit because I have heels though. Having worked with actually within development institution and with development institution for funding program. I agree with all of you. The problem is that we have resources, like especially funding resources and a huge network, powerful network connected with politics and so on. And they are completely disconnected with the actual reality on the ground. It's slowly changing, of course, but what we need is indeed more collaboration and more trust in the collaboration. And by that, I mean, you don't just sign like a local partnership with a small NGO locally or whatever grassroots movement and then whenever the person or the organization offer an initiative that is not in the initial plan, not be flexible and not funding. Because if you want change, you have to trust the people who know the reality and be as fast as they are. And this is the problem. Be able to allow funds and resources like HR mentoring and so on to these small institutions and small groups. This is the best way to have an impact, I guess. Thank you. Are there questions in the audience? Do we have a... Yeah, just... Thanks for the interesting discussion. I wanted to ask... I myself am from Iraq as well and I wanted to ask you guys, I don't know how it is with you, how is the idea of becoming an entrepreneur in your country seen as? Because in my country, it's the best thing to become a doctor, it's the best thing to become an engineer, make your parents proud and happy. And becoming an entrepreneur is not really that much of a... It's not really desirable right now. It's not the top priority for a lot of young people in my own country. So how it is in yours and is it changing? I have that. I totally agree. Especially in the difference, I think from what I know from Naribe and Kero, there are more dynamic ecosystems for a start. Morocco is a very young entrepreneur scene. It's still seen as something different and not desirable or people don't understand. Nobody in my entourage in Morocco understands what I'm doing. But it's slowly changing because of the activism of the actual ecosystem. The more it grows and the more you start working with big companies to get funded, there are more and more programs. And so there is more awareness about it. So there is a big challenge of storytelling and you have to work with media, online platform, with big companies and government, even if it's the less dynamic institution is supposed to follow. So yeah, it is difficult, but it is changing, slowly, slowly. Okay, we have one question here. Coming back to the headline of Brain Drain, you discussed very much that obviously you want to keep initiatives local, et cetera, and at the same time the ministry and so on, of course, trying to help with that and many other institutions as well. However, at the same time, there's multiple EU member states, for example, that set up programs that make it easier for entrepreneurs to get visas, to set up companies here. There's Estonia with the E-Residency program that measures its success by how many people set up companies in Estonia. Is it something that worries you that at the same time these European or Western countries are basically trying to get the best talents to Europe or to the US, et cetera, through these programs? I learned about the Estonia program when I was in Finland about a year and a half ago and I think it's brilliant because you talked about scaling and diversifying and a challenge that we do have in Kenya is actually getting, when we actually see talent, it doesn't matter where you're from. It's really expensive to pay for work permits. It's probably double three times the cost. If you can actually make that easier to actually bring talent in a specific country or have regulations like the E-Residency program where you can actually have part of your team in Estonia and register a company in Estonia at a very low cost and keep that down because the highest cost of a startup is actually starting. I think that that is actually brilliant. I think that's a really good move in my opinion. I'd also briefly introduce Lukas van Zalinger. He's working with the BMZ on creating digital economy or entrepreneurship opportunities for Syrian refugees in Turkey. I'd like to introduce briefly the work you're doing. Hi everyone. Since I don't have high heels, I think I can stand quickly. I just wanted to quickly share with you a very interesting project we're implementing for GIZ. It's about creating employment and entrepreneurship for refugees, for Syrian refugees actually in Turkey, also including the German IT industry. We just started the project so I cannot tell you too much about the results. We started two weeks ago, but there are some figures and some insights I wanted to share with you. First of all, what we saw that we have relatively small but very dynamic IT industry in Turkey with about 2,500 companies but growing very rapidly. What we also found out that there's a very dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem which has the potential to give a lot of jobs to Syrians. What we also found as figures which I wanted to share with you and I think this is very relevant for what we're discussing today, if you look at the startups, newly established businesses in Turkey in 2015, we found out that about 32% of these newly established companies were established by Syrian refugees and about 50% of the startups which were established in a joint venture with Turkish and Syrian entrepreneurs. I think this is a very relevant figure when we discuss this topic which we have today because it shows the potential which migration have, which the refugees have for pushing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, for creating jobs and it also shows the great potential of the digital technologies of the digital industries. We can see actually this pattern from some other projects we're implementing on behalf of GIZ in Kosovo for example where we also work on promoting the digital industry in combination with promoting business of refugees and migrants and I think this is a very, very interesting relevant topic as I said before because it's a dynamic industry, it's a very good industry to create jobs for young people as we heard and saw today and it creates high level jobs, highly qualified jobs and therefore I think we should really push this topic and we hope that with this project in Turkey we can also make a good contribution to this very interesting project activities. Thank you. I think we have time for one more question and I saw a hand here. Hello, my name is Christian, I'm from the Development Corporation as well. It's another question, I just want to back up what you said from Egypt. Jessica, you know I love the way you think and your ideas and of course it would be great to just sit down and really experiment, have crazy ideas and either scale it or lose it afterwards but it's still difficult from a governmental perspective to test because it's not so easy, we have to justify towards taxpayers and stuff. So I can rather see the role and I think that's what you said in our function as a kind of a broker, as a facilitator. We are not disruptive, we are not really innovative but you guys are but what we can do is bring you guys together or network with you with other guys because we have the contacts and we have the policy credibility in a way. You have the street cred, we have the policy cred in a way. One brief last question, I saw a hand back there. Thank you. I was just wondering, there's two great women sitting up there but overall what's your experience of the participation of women in entrepreneurship? Can a man answer that? Please do, it's interesting, I'd like to know your opinion. So basically I'll talk on my experience, our team is nearly 50 or 60 percent females, our summit has nearly 5,000 and these 40 percent of them are women. And we've seen I think much more female founders and female people in tech and entrepreneurship in the past two years than any other ecosystem. I've been to nearly 30 countries, we've seen all the ecosystems. So honestly, I would say they're better than the Egyptian and Arab men have usually encountered in terms of working with. They're usually less egoistic, they're very targeted and very focused on what they want to do and very, very passionate about what they have. So on the entrepreneurship side, I can't generalize more than that but on the entrepreneurship side, it's a very, very positive ratio. Thanks a lot. Yes, maybe just a little addition but it's like gender is a very important topic for me and I organize many events in the region, especially since it's really complicated in terms of a social situation in the whole Middle East and North Africa. But in the small ecosystem of entrepreneurship, it is actually where we see the gender balance starting to shift. And for example, it's like 35 percent of female founders of entrepreneurs are female in the MENA region and it's like 10 percent in the rest of the world. So yeah, it's difficult but it's changing again. And what's happening on entrepreneurship in the MENA region and Africa as well is probably the future of this region, right? And probably part of the big future of the world because as again, statistically it's 60 percent of the population. So when we have a very strong economy one day that taxpayers are actually deciding on who to rule them and who to decide on their own policies, these are the people who are going to vote and according to these are the people who are going to state what their future are. So as much as it's shaky right now and transitional with all the changes of governments and changes of policies, I think the future is really bright and you have three examples of people who just decide to stay there and make this happen and we know thousands of others. We're just a smaller presentation of a very big generation. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much to the three of you. I'll try to wrap this up briefly and correct me if I miss something. So I think bottom line, there is potential, there is drive and what we see is that it's where there's friction where change actually sparks and gets bigger. And friction doesn't only mean conflicts inside of countries that makes people together, join forces and rise up but also means friction between institutions that are maybe not really having the frameworks that are supportive to reality as we see it and as the generations who are not the young and upcoming but the ones that are young and right there right now fighting for the change they want to see in the world to support those frameworks. So one of you mentioned basically said we need to break down hierarchies, work together, don't actually see this distinction between governance and those people who actually serve so maybe that's the essence of the advice like equal out divides within countries between people but also between those who make, who set the frameworks and those who drive the change. Thanks so much, thanks to you everyone. Thank you.
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Creative and full of innovative approaches, young entrepreneurs in low-income countries are building a path towards greater economic development. Through initiating new networks and setting up collaborative environments, these entrepreneurs are creating opportunities both for themselves and others. As such, this session will look at how innovation and entrepreneurship can offer long-term perspectives for young people in their home countries.
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10.5446/20709 (DOI)
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Yeah, hi everybody. My name is Leah Gimpel. I'm a policy advisor and I'm here with four wonderful people on the panel. We have Juan Carlos Lara. He's a research and policy manager at Der Riches-Degutales from Chile. We have Kutzei Mubaywa. She's a co-founder and manager of ISO and Hub in Zimbabwe. We have a wonderful Nigeria Zambuli. She's an independent policy advisor and researcher and she used to work for IHUB research in Kenya. And we have Kaceline Berger. She's an independent policy advisor as well and she currently works for Global Partners Digital. So before we dive deep into our topic, I would like to start with a short overview of the state of sero-rating and natural reality around the world and ask all four of you, what's the state of sero-rating in your home country today? Whoever wants to start? Well, I will take the final decision to start then. So studies have shown that sero-rating is one of the more popular approaches to actually accessing data in Kenya. So the Alliance for Affordable Internet did a study of eight countries in the developing world and of all eight, so four in Africa and two in Latin America and two in Southeast Asia, of those Kenya had the highest sero-rating models. Now the thing about it that was particularly interesting is that it's actually quite normalized as a means of getting access. So the popular social networks, oh, maybe I should even backtrack. Does anyone not know what sero-rating is in the room? Okay, great. Ah, right. I see, I got you. So the idea being somebody other than the customer is going to pay for your access, is going to pay for the access of service. And so in this case, you find it's mostly social networks that are sero-rated. So you have programs or bundles or that kind of arrangement that allows you to access maybe Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram, WhatsApp, those are usually bundled together. So that kind of access is at almost no cost. Or even if you buy bundles and they expire, you can still access those services for free. So that's the state. It's one of the more popular access points for us, at least in Kenya. So speaking for the EU, not exactly a country, but still, the sero-rating will be regulated on a EU level. And the status quo is that it is not currently clear what the status is. So we have a regulation on net neutrality, which just entered into force this Saturday. And in that, some say it could be interpreted that sero-rating is banned and something that maybe in case by case, it could be legal. So the process that we're currently facing is that the body of European regulators for electronic communication, which we call BAREC, which is 28 regulators, the national regulators meet and decide on the guidelines on how to implement that regulation. The regulation is directly applicable in all 28 member states of the European Union. And sero-rating is one of the main things that we need to figure out how to deal with. There is some precedent in European member state countries like the Netherlands and Slovenia, there's sero-rating is already banned. So we're hoping that these countries will also push for a ban on it for a range of reasons. We're going into the reasons for that later. In the case of Chile, the case is very special because it's the first country in the world that enacted a net neutrality law. So you would expect that sero-rating services would be banned outright. And the truth is, they are prohibited by law. But at the same time, while we saw that regulator provided a statement saying that the telcos were not allowed to publicize their sero-rated services, that they still exist and that they are normalized. And actually people do not exchange their phone numbers anymore. They exchange their WhatsApp numbers. But still, it's something very special because even though you saw the statement and you saw the regulators very explicitly banning sero-rated services advertisement, still those services exist. And actually one of the most recent telcos to come into the market expanded the offer of sero-rated services to Instagram and Snapchat, aside from Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. But at the same time, while we do not see that until this is being enforced, the net neutrality law, even though it could be enforced. At the same time, the regulator at one point said Wikipedia's Sero would be allowed. So zero-rated services are banned, but they still exist. And Wikipedia's Sero was supported, but it's not operating until it. So it's a very interesting case of the law meaning practically nothing. And I come from Zimbabwe. And I'll generally hazard to say that zero-rating is not a thing in my country. Net neutrality is even worse. It's not a thing at all. You can't bring it up, you'll be attacked left, right and center. And this is why the typical Zimbabwean accesses their internet via mobile device, so mostly smartphones. And you'll find that for most people, the first way they were introduced to the internet or what they call the internet is WhatsApp. This is because when WhatsApp came through, it was very popular, using very, very little bandwidth, even if it was paid for. And one of the biggest telecommunications companies which is called Econet got wind of that and they then began to create what are called bundles. So most of the internet access in my country is mobile and it's through what are called bundles where they allow you to get bandwidth that allows you to access just WhatsApp only or bandwidth that allows you just to access Facebook only and to a small extent bandwidth that allows you to access Opera Mini only for a very small fee for an entire period. And those are extremely popular because I always like to joke and say because Zimbabweans are also very used to bundling when it comes to simple things like food, you know, the way that we stay, geographical location, the places which are called locations where you have high density, you know, high density sort of establishments for staying. And people generally tend to buy only as much food as they may need for that day. So they'll buy, you know, a bundle of vegetables and they'll buy a little portion of cooking oil or they'll buy a little portion of millimil, just enough for that day. And that is a way of life. So when it extends to internet access and you can get a bundle for a very small amount, no one has problems with that. If anything, the only people who may have issues with net neutrality and zero rating are startups and which we'll probably speak about a little bit later on. And when they do try and raise that up with, you know, policy makers, the third pattern is to say, look, this is a Western thing. What is your issue? So essentially in ZIM that is where we are, there is literally no policy, no legislation against it. And in terms of the zero rating proper of websites, I think just two come to mind. Firstly, there are, you know, those MOOCs, the, you know, the places where you can actually learn online. So Coursera is zero rated by the biggest network provider which is Econet. And I think that may sound more like a good move because it's for education. The other interesting bit is the other site that is popularly known or people are aware of that is zero rated is a site which is called ony.co.zw. Now I'll conclude with a very short story about how on why it came about. Econet which has about 60% of, you know, the mobile internet in Zimbabwe provides 60%, they have the largest market, started up an online or an e-commerce platform which was called Tengai. Tengai is a Shona word that means buy, Tengai.co.zw. And when they introduced it into Zimbabwe, it was zero rated and it was widely touted as a free place to access. It didn't last a week, within a week hackers had come in and they pulled down that site. And that was in July of 2015. And the third pattern was that, you know, the guys that were in that simple space, similar space of e-commerce, the third pattern is that someone actually did that because they didn't want to fight, you know, they don't want to compete with Econet. The feeling was it's unfair. They already have, you know, mobile users and they themselves want to run a startup and they introduced it as zero rated. What about all of these guys who have been working all along? And essentially they actually only then came back online. That site re-resurrected actually in November 2015 and now it's called ony but it's still zero rated. Okay, great. So it seems like the legal framework is different in most of the countries but still zero rated products are around, they are used. What do you think, what kind of implications are the most notable regarding zero rated products, like both positive and negative ones? For example, for access to information but also for startups and innovation. Wow, my voice. Okay. Well, at the end of the day, whether it's a good or a bad thing, that's what happens in many panels. We don't have enough research yet about the implications good or bad and so a lot of what we're talking about is speculative and really about trying to curb, especially the bad before it happens, really trying to mitigate before the fact. But for instance, with having your US based Western social media platforms being zero rated, it must convey a message to startups. A very strong one. I haven't heard except for the ZIM example of too many local options being zero rated. Now with three basics entering the market, that's the Facebook, formerly internet.org platform. They are trying though as the gatekeepers so to speak to bring in more local partners into their site. So it really comes down to how we want to view it. The good for actors is yes, there's some internet and I understand it's exactly what Kudzai is saying for people on the ground. They're just like, yo, I get to talk to my family, I get to do this, that or the other. So what does it matter? You know, I'm connected. So for them, that could be a good and it's something we have to factor in even in this conversation for the telcos or the people, ISPs, internet service providers who are providing the zero rated services. Most often than not, and especially in Africa it's been found, it's always the second entrance to market who is trying to find a network effect. So they think they will have more people, you know, join their platforms by using this as a way to get more people just by a result of being in the note. So that could be a good for them. The bad is we are now sitting at a situation where say there's an election situation and access to some of the more popular platforms for communication or access to information are zero rated or on this one platform. When a telco is told to take that down. So if that telco is blocked, how what are the other forms for people to communicate, right? So the question then becomes if accessing this five say what's up Facebook and other types is free or zero rated so it's at no cost to the user, but if those are blocked for any reason, how else will they connect to the world? How else will they go? What is that cost? Will they even want to go online if those are not available? That's when we start venturing into the bad and potentially ugly. And so what we are seeing is that we are talking about somebody somewhere having so much power about what constitutes what we can access at no cost. And there's a conversation there we have to have still a acknowledging that for some people they're saying, wait, we have some access. All good. I'm connecting to my family and my friends. I'm taking my selfies and posting them. What's the wahala as they would say? I feel like there's a lot of layers to this question and zero rating often gets conflated with a lot of issues. So there's you said that wiki pde zero for instance, there was that exception in the Chilean law. The difference is it's a one single service app. So it's that one app that gets zero rated. Whereas the bundle that happens with free basics, for instance, in Africa and in Asia and I think they're like in 25 countries now. That's a bundle access and they pretend to be the internet because there's more than this one app and it's also not an app that's on top of your data that you already have but it's your first entry which creates a completely different set of problems. And I think that is also something that we need to be aware of and that might not be the discussion that we usually have within the European Union because usually zero rating would not be your first entry point to the internet but it's something that comes on top of the data you already have. So what we're usually discussing is that our data caps get lower and lower and lower because they want us to use particular services. So it's a competition aspect but at the same time those companies especially the huge US based ones, they're also not acting alone but they're using competitive patterns in the countries where they partner with because they always need an ISP to partner with. They cannot just offer their services without that. And then the other thing that when we're talking from the European level is there's a lot of development aid money going into questions like right to access and then if there's this certain appeal of like I remember in a research project that we've done last year, we talked to a South African trust fund which is called FUNSA Literacy Trust and their aim is to basically get people to read and to provide books and that's really a public interest, educational, non-profit service and all they want to do is make sure that people are in a position to even read because what you use is the internet if you're not even able to read like you need that information. So it's really from a development aid perspective literacy, very important. That's the only way to innovate and to actually be creative and culturally diverse. So there is a huge appeal to that and they are zero rated on free basics in South Africa. They are also partnering with local projects which provide data, Wi-Fi data for free and their data users is never actually calculated against that data cap and I get it from their point of view because it's not a digital divide, it's an information divide but at the same time if you use it with them where do you draw the line? And from a human rights perspective that might sound like very idealistic but ultimately long term goals from a human rights perspective I would say that's still tricky even though I totally understand that it's very important but like that case by case judgment which a lot of people are advocating for is just going to be like a slippery slope and I see a lot of dangers to that. And I find it very interesting that you speak about the case by case because even if we speak about Wikipedia serial we can still discuss which are the criteria under which some services might be allowed to be zero rated or not. We can talk about that a bit later. But in terms of the consequences and whether they're good or bad it's true that some people or many people will value very highly to be able to use certain services without having to pay extra for them while the data caps are getting lower and lower and while they are pretty much using the spectrum also to administer scarcity and to take advantage of this scarcity of this forced scarcity to provide certain services and guide people to use some and not others. In the Latin American context very specifically and also echoing some of the concerns about the African countries some of the biggest issues that we have is related to access to the internet and to the use of access to the internet especially considering some limitations in our infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure and how it has not been taken as a task by the states and it's mostly given as a task for private actors. And in that sense we're pretty much getting locked in by certain services because those are the ones that we'll provide it and other than that we barely have any access. There's very little instances of public access even though they are still getting there in certain big cities and not in the far away places. So to have these services and to have the possibility to access the internet for some people might be okay. But the thing is that we speak about especially in the digital rights realm about the potential of the internet and we are not seeing that being developed when people are able sometimes to read what their friends say but not really able to talk back to a broader audience. So even though we still are lacking in terms of evidence on that we can still identify some of the risks that we identify as bad for that. I think I'll echo some of the sentiments my colleagues have already highlighted and say for me the way I perceive it is that I think there's more harm than good in my view from zero rating. There's a popular song I've just forgotten who sang it that says the first cut is the deepest. I'm going to give you a moment to think about that. So I really feel if you're going to take the pains to actually get people to access a few sites then why not get the entire way? Because for me the whole essence of the internet is literally fought against the moment we begin to doll it out and dish it out in small portions. So for me the feeling is while I understand that there are places where it may do really good stuff like whether it's health or probably education consent but my feeling is if you're going to reach out to them at all then you may as well give them the full monty. So those are my initial thoughts. All right. You already mentioned Wikipedia Zero. I'm sure you read about Cason Angola where the zero rating off of us misused by certain people. How do you see this example and what does it mean for other zero rated products and how are we going to deal with them? I will very strongly with my lack of voice jump on that one because it's not abuse. It's people co-opting it for what they wanted it to be and I hats off to the Angolans for that. So the context. Wikipedia gives Wikipedia Zero through one of the leading telcos in Angola and there's also Facebook Zero available. Now those were mostly and what happens with zero rated sites is mostly text heavy. But what did the Angolans want from the internet? They wanted visuals. They wanted images. They wanted videos. So what do they do? They find ways to put links to the images and the videos that they want to watch in Wikipedia articles and then share on closed Facebook groups. I mean like I read that as like hats off slow cloud. Like tan freaking neon. Now what that puts Wikipedia in a quagmire, right? So do they keep taking the sites down? Do they keep taking those pages down? But then what happens to the do good intention? You are giving the poor people some internet, right? So what do you do? And the groups are very closely regulated, like they're really tightly regulated so they only live, it's very bounded in terms of the community aspect. Now what that tells us is at the end of the day, yes, you can supply because you know we are coming from wherever we are coming or they are coming from wherever they are coming to save the world from itself and giving them a version of the internet because some is better than none but the market is pushing back and saying we'll take your sum, we're going to make it our own and we're going to show you that at the end of the day this is not a viable option. And for me that is a powerful example of the fact that there's no, this notion of giving people some little bits is actually condescending and it speaks to the development tropes that have not been addressed in other circuits. We've seen that with water, we've seen that with education and health. Sum is better than none, let's dish it out and beat some pieces but the internet is that last final thing and I love that there's that right to push back and again I just say slow clap to the Angolan's man, good job. I just want to say like awesome, I want to see more innovators doing that and just hacking the tools. I think that's absolutely fantastic. There was another example, I'm just going to steal it from Juan Carlos because I'm not sure you're going to mention that Peru one but there was also a coder in Peru who basically wrote a tool that used Facebook zero and made it possible to then jump to other news sites because they were incorporated as well in Facebook zero. Awesome, please keep doing that. Like I can just support that because that's the only way to actually also bring it home that this is about human rights in freedom of expression, freedom of speech is, you know, you can't do that if you're just being dished out little pieces and like Nigeria usually says it's like with the water example, well we give you water but whether it's portable or not, different question. We'll discuss that once everyone has already drank in the polluted one and that's just not where we want to go. As much as that might be appealing from a public service perspective or from an education perspective it sets precedence which we might not be able to fight back because also governments are losing control over the corporate interest that drives that innovation factor. Going forward with that Paraguayan example of hacking the platform. The idea that we have this little internet or no internet drives us to a dichotomy which is false that it's either none or very little and the truth is that we should expect more than that especially nowadays that the internet is so much used for video contents. For instance if you want to see an awesome zero rated panel on YouTube that was on Republican this year that you could expect to do that but then if you have like very low data caps or you do not have the zero rated services that allow you to see that video you'll be limited in the kind of contents that you will be able to find out. The kind of content you'll be having access to or the kind of content that you'll be able to produce. But that argument about having little or having non political arguments that we definitely need to fight back. Yeah. All right. I agree with all of them. So apart from hacking zero rated products do you know of any app or service that you would say is that it's useful that it's zero rated or do you think that generally there should be any zero rated product and how do we go on how can we draw a line between so things for me. Okay. I was just trying to break the mold that we start from that side for once I lead. Okay. I'm hacking it. Hacking the panel. If I was putting a corner I would say what's up because I found that obviously for many people it's extremely user friendly. My mom is 59 she 1060 next year all things being equal and she has no cares for the internet for the rest of it. But she does want pictures of her grandchild and she does not pay that much for the internet. She will not bother herself with trying to pay for bandwidth but as long as she's able to actually access WhatsApp and I find that it's a very easy path for many people who are in rural areas like in Zim most people actually live in rural areas. There's more people who are rural than urban. The same way they caught on to mobile money is the same way that they've easily caught on to things like WhatsApp. So in my perfect world if we just needed to choose one app and make that one with zero rated for life I would make it WhatsApp because I feel that it has opportunity to hack a whole lot of things particularly because of the way that you can communicate through it. It can be used during times of elections for example as a way of communicating. It can be used as an early warning system. You can literally send messages, you can send text, you can send images, you can send video and more recently now you can put documents onto it. So if I had a choice out that would be my one. I see Nigeria shaking her head. Disagree very strongly with my comrades here. The problem is why not to say a local startup in Zimbabwe that would do the same thing or issue the same service. Now I think for me here it becomes very tricky because this is still a western company now owned by another behemoth Facebook that we are saying yes has great utility absolutely but the problem with that is yes it's an idea of a pragmatic approach but why them and not somebody else. The problem with case by case is that actually so far I must say with the idea especially of zero rated apps is all for doing good. I mean Facebook say they're going to make absolutely nothing from that. They're not going to sell ads to people right. So everyone if it's that's the benchmark that they're doing some good. A lot of people who are trying to zero rate their services that's exactly what Wikipedia says because they are not for profit how can that be a bad thing. I think for me the thing is either zero rate some a whole portion like a bit rate equal bit rate low bit rate everybody accesses the internet at slower speeds but it's a full entirety of the internet or we don't go down that path because who gets to decide who's the do good and who isn't. That's entering dangerous territory we are asking governments to regulate and that's asking governments to you know to basically facilitate the interest. So if I'm better at lobbying and you're not better at lobbying and we're now telling governments original bodies or others to decide between you and I who gets to be zero rated or any other entity we're entering a dangerous territory. Okay sorry hacking back I want to go back to a few examples of the last things Nanjira mentioned especially like the lobbying capabilities to the example of Chile going back the announcement that Wikipedia zero would be accepted which again I insist it's not operating until late but that it could be accepted was after a meeting between the representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation and the regulator the Undersecretary of Telecommunications so it was pretty much the result of a meeting that was highly publicized. But then you see those levels like okay they met with the regulator the regulator is a very high it's very high in its support for Wikipedia so of course they would say that it could be applied so after that we question which would be the criteria to allow that but the lobbying capabilities even if it's one innocent meeting go higher and higher up and in the case of Latin America we saw several presidents of whole countries shaking hands with Mark Zuckerberg. We saw the president of Brazil wearing the jacket of Facebook at some point and you can see the picture of that on the internet. So when you see that kind of handshaking on high levels necessarily the decision of which services will be zero rated or will be allowed to be provided for free and therefore making every other one infinitely more expensive is a decision that is in the end not necessarily dedicated through regulations but highly politicized. So since now I have the last word yay. I think like it's like from a human rights perspective I don't really see how to actually access that because there's always implications of what is threatened and how that's infringing on the WhatsApp example I would say like hey let's go free software and use something that's actually properly encrypted so go for a signal but then like what makes like what tells us that there's not going to be a better app that then also needs to be zero rated like it's just it's a circle that we can't actually ever break if we make that decision once so that case by case is very very difficult and I think like in the African context for instance where the US companies come in like is the regulator in that but in Zimbabwe or in Kenya in a position to decide on whether a foreign company gets in or should we make that decision only in the national context and then only national products get zero rated I just think like again that's even the case by case apart from it being super resource intense like I mean who who is going to sit down and assess all those apps and make sure that there's a proper analysis that also takes quite a bit of administrative work which I'm not sure every government has I just know do we want that exactly there's other things that they should be more worried about but apart from zero rating why not just call it equal rating and like just have a data cap that's used for these apps for everything and I get to choose what I want to do so that I don't have to because for instance I don't use WhatsApp because I find it super annoying so like give me my data and I use signal but that's just I think a lot easier and also like with the Indian case it's very unfortunate that we don't have anyone who can actually share the successes of India with us but they actually mentioned that the thing that is okay and that they can access case by case is equal rating like yes if there's data for everyone you want to provide that as an ISP fine but anything that's discriminatory and it always is if you re zero rate one service is not acceptable and I think that's a super great way forward and I can I can only hope that other countries will follow suit I still have a thought on that I've got to come back and defend my my my WhatsApp yes I thought now if you read up on how it happened in Zimbabwe for them to end up bundling things like WhatsApp it's not because they offered them first they literally just followed the trends because we're asking ourselves so who gets to decide it's the people they just saw where people were going and they said look we see where you're going we see your vision we're coming with you and we make a bit of money you know while we're doing it and frankly the typical person because we are speaking about case by case here would not mind paying less you know by paying for a WhatsApp bundle instead of actually getting equal rating in that case however I'm still with with you friends when it comes to the equal rating that's a good starting point but I'm saying in places where operators have seen that people truly are making great use of a particular app and they offer it as a as a as a product that can can help people at a lower cost than probably what equal rating would have been I see I say why not I'm now wondering if you're a lobbyist for one of the time I pay for all of my it's just that in the case of my country really it's all of those bundles did really come because they saw a where people were taking their traffic to and they literally just followed so they made it easy for us but but however I'm still with you and it comes to equal rating because I believe the normal argument with you know I'm telcos is to say we've invested so much in infrastructure you can't just come in here and say we can't zero rate this person if they are willing to pay we need to get back our investment or something like that I still feel you know equal rating it's the same across the board only also with the telcos that they're really slinging mud on the wall and hoping something sticks because in Kenya for instance the same regulator that zero rates Facebook and WhatsApp is trying to have them regulated avoid voice over IP regulated so it's a very schizophrenic thing and at the end of the day could die the thing is even if it's WhatsApp or sick like there's a middle person there who has so much in by way of data and what what's the alternative if I want choice if I want choice and that's the only option yes where do I go and at what cost and this is where the problem where it may look good on that value and yes I've had very many government officials say that I mean what does it matter but what choice here if I have to opt out what do I opt out to sure is it bad that I start sending grievance again smoke signals you know that's that's where that thing for me becomes very political and very worrying even if there's a demand factor yes we all use WhatsApp or many of us use WhatsApp except Kathleen here I think she's the only person at this conference I know who doesn't use WhatsApp but the choice factor yeah I think here we still talk about freedoms and maybe I'm hacking the question and saying the thing is here also we talk about freedom and internet freedom and what worries me and the message I keep carrying across is freedom is being taken to mean free at no cost especially for people in the developing world this notion of bringing free internet is saying free at no cost but taking away the freedom freedom of choice freedom to express yourself really because if there are certain platforms who's to say somebody there's not a bigger man somewhere determining which are the big five I'm just saying yeah so yeah you know maybe I should just end by saying this before someone throws it at me because they will really then push me out of the argument they actually we're talking about hacking in ZIM because WhatsApp is so so cheap and easy to get because there's bundles for it we also have a WhatsApp bot now that's going to be OT where people actually hack within WhatsApp so there's certain you know words you can actually put in and you can use WhatsApp as a search engine yeah inside WhatsApp that's how fantastic we are as barbwins you know but it's really originated from you know from some Indian guys and they actually literally can be able to use WhatsApp you know as a search place you can use it to access some quizzes to access some games and a whole lot of interesting things and I think it comes by what you've just been saying Nigeria to say ultimately you know people do also want the freedom to do more than WhatsApp and if people are hacking inside the WhatsApp handle that should be used as an indicator they want more if I may add one thing that comes up with what Nigeria and Kudzai have just said to me that also raises a lot of privacy concerns actually if we are in those apps because they have it's not just not free as in freedom of choice it's also not free as in they are gaining something from the fact that everyone is using that and from a privacy perspective that is really really scary and like we've just I mean the EU data protection law to bring it to the EU context just once more actually says that a customers have to have informed consent so I need to know what exactly is gathered about me which data is collected how long it's stored how it's processed do we know that with free basics do we know that with any of those apps in the context of zero rating I'm not so sure the other thing is that the regulation the data protection regulation also says that there needs to be an alternative because that's the only way that we can make sure that people are informed and actually can give consent to something because if you only have one choice there's like consent is meaningless so that again from a private and that is because that's the only way to protect your privacy if you are in control of your data and I think a lot of this is actually undermined with that discussion of is that one app zero rated do we even if we hack it it's still on this app and the data still flows to the same corporation and that's just not good. Thanks. Yeah I would love to go a little bit deeper into the whole privacy debate and also internet freedom however we are running a little bit out of time so I would love to know from you what kind of implications do you see for policy makers regarding this aspect do you have any concrete recommendations what do we need do we need a global standard how can we go on and how can we also work with civil society together what how can we inspire action and what needs to be done. Okay. Big question. I will the message I've been working with policy makers in Africa and telling them look first and foremost inform yourself. Inform yourself about the economics of it and the social political implications first and foremost. The second thing is we need to demand more research and there's so much more research that needs to happen here to inform we need empirical evidence so you have for instance with advancement of free basics in Africa for example the only statistic the only reference point we have is from Facebook itself that within 30 days most users then graduate to the full internet yet when you really really dig dip and ring their hands and really ring Facebook's hands they do inform that sometimes it's mostly the same people who have already been using the internet who are using free basics when you know you run out of bundles and maybe it's too late to go out and buy air time so we don't have data and something that is being pushed put forth as a developmental gender if we do not have the statistics and they don't have research and as a researcher I don't have access to that empirical evidence I'm worried and so I think for me it's research research research and our policy makers need to inform themselves first and foremost I don't want it to be a biased angle I want to be able to have a conversation with someone from Facebook Wikipedia zero everyone in the same room but we're making our case to make informed you know an informed point of view about what we're trying to do here but mostly importantly oh yeah one other thing governments are in Africa right now have been doing this thing called the universal service access funds or some variation of it and this is where all these actors are supposed to put in money a percentage of their gross gross income towards actually at forward advancing internet in its entirety why don't we just let that work and they need that is a whole issue of political will and it's a very touchy issue but I think that approach still needs to be given credence and so that would be I'd rather we still keep pushing for advancing the internet in its entirety and to make it more affordable so that we stop having this notion that free means no cost for the poor people of the global south who have been connected because of the next billion some really messy stuff there but yeah apart from research I totally agree but research also needs to be funded and for funding from certain sites to come you also need political will like we had that over the last three days people have been saying like who run the world abs well you know if there's an apropolitical will I think the problem would have been solved already it's not but that is very important how do we do that like how do we in sand like get people to be excited about this talk to your governments be engaged in the discussion open the dialogue I think as long as we don't keep making that point and bringing those arguments home and making sure that everyone's at the table because it is a very complex topic and there's a lot of things and a lot of concerns to be heard we're not getting anywhere and I think broadening that dialogue apart from having data to support the arguments that we're bringing in those conversations is very very important because otherwise it's just this will provide someone is already providing access so why should I be engaged that's like you know even if you want to do good doesn't mean that you may be aware of all the other things that are happening like with development agencies for instance when they say like oh but there's a Wi-Fi provider the only thing is you have to give up your biometric data to lock onto the data great how about data protection there's so many aspects to this so just make sure that all the experts are at the table and for that it needs every one of us to be involved not just the experts but the interested parties that might not really be experts but have an interest that have a stake in this argument because when we're defending like the value of not having just zero rated apps or services here and there in what we are trying to push forward is the value of the full internet so that's something that might require some support but that's what civil society groups are supposed to do as well not just saying how bad it is that you people have free WhatsApp but on the contrary how important it is that the internet is valued as this broader thing I do support completely obviously the idea of the need for more information on this there are the policy implications are not just about what we need to do but also about what this means in terms of the political arguments as well knowing that the idea of this northern I'd rather say northern than western corporations are providing this all this kind of services and they are expanding their user base and they're pretty much doing what what what other northern companies have done throughout history in in continents like Africa like Asia like Latin America where they have they have been expanding their user base and any possible regulatory action will be only a reaction when the market is already set so these are very political arguments that we need to take into account and we need to also provide the arguments to be to our constituencies to our audiences and to obviously our policymakers in order to to provide for recommendations for the best possible solutions that include the interest of the people who want to keep using the services but also the interest the interest of entrepreneurs entrepreneurs that are programmers and everyone who is part of the digital economy which is such a big part of the discourse in the developing world. I might not just be to say I think it's important that policymakers go back to basics and by basics I speak of no no oh god I'll take that again I think it's important for policymakers to go back to the basics nothing free there and and that would be number one that they take account of you know public interest which is what they're there for policies about you know managing how people you know get certain things but also take account of the very basic thing of why why the internet itself exists so whatever policy is coming up must still safeguard the fact that the internet is let me let me say this loosely because it will work probably for those that are in the global south but loosely we could call them internet like as a means of production everybody must have access to some kind of means of production and then what they build from it is really up up to them so I think that must be the thinking that comes into it to say the very essence of the internet itself must always you know super super meaning from a quality that or supersede the interests that are found by the different players and it must come down to common interest how can it best help you know people at large yeah great you already said we have to open up a dialogue and that's what I would like to do now are there any questions from the audience comments don't be shy people come on or contentions I think this is a really fascinating conversation and depending on where you are you may have different thoughts about it do you have any recent do you have any recommendations on resources about where these kind of conversations that are happening here on stage are happening on forums or is there is there any good source that's kind of aggregating these different points for activists that may be trying to explain this issue to their communities I can just say that in a German context for instance the the gates which is the German development agencies they're actually open to this conversation because they're very engaged in the whole right to access debate and that's the same for the development eight ministry otherwise I would say usually it depends on where you are often it's the IZT ministry but it's not so hard to actually get in touch with your lawmakers if you're interested in that so you get but you have to seek them out and it's not like they're not going to be here per se if they're not invited because it's not the natural entry point so there needs to be an effort from both sides I would say it's not per se easy but it's definitely possible but yeah I mean it takes time and also the question is like who has the resources to commit that sort of time another entry point where this is happening is internationally so there's a lot of forum and meetings where this conversation is taking place where also policy makers go like I remember from my time in the foreign office I participated in so many conferences that was always an issue and yes I did take it back home but then again how do you get the funding to actually participate in those conferences but if you're interested there's a lot of foundations out there who can help and how we can actually make sure that remote access for instance to participate can get better is a huge issue and a question that we haven't actually answered yet. Very quickly the work by the Alliance for Affordable Internet is really useful around this I don't know why Kathleen did mention that she just published a paper around the issue so we're all writing and really trying to put forth this argument in more eloquent English words like buzzwords so that they're right and so I think on this actually on this platform there are a lot of people here who have already written so it's a good question about where we can aggregate that and make a I guess concerted effort but there are some scattered resources all over the internet the free the full entire internet open access and fetid. Yeah I was just going to weigh in and say I think Mozilla as well they're really brilliant job of making particularly the advocacy arm they do make a brilliant case they can pitch it whatever level at the very technical level but also programs that they run at a simple community meetups as well so those are a very good source of getting you know resources and I know they do engage a lot on these issues. Yeah there are some campaigns that have happened regarding the regulations in the EU like save the internet the same thing for India there have been campaigns there is discussion there is the Alliance for Affordable Internet and all those and all those venues and conferences where this kind of things are discussed in English but it's always important to go back to your local context and to contact your own constituency and your own policy makers and speak in a language like literally a language that they can understand and to provide the arguments and not just leave them in the hands of the global civil society that speaks in English. Can I just weigh in on something that you said which I think is extremely important so let me reiterate I think the community and the local localization of these issues is extremely important in our own experience in Zim you'd find if you bring in the guys from the Ministry of ICT they literally don't know what net neutrality is and this is a whole director in charge of internet and other things no idea so I do believe that there is scope also to try and actually engage you know at those levels and it can make a difference. Yes hi my name is Norman I'm a policy advisor to our not really German development ministry thanks for the interesting discussion I have a question like just to be bold what would you recommend and how should I do my job for example should we fight rating products and kind of you know fight them to not have them anymore or should we be more moderate and particularly when we have voices that say let's look for regulations for example to regulate them. Honest answer do not incentivize it from a human rights perspective don't do it provide like fund the free software support the open source community make sure that these tools can actually be reproduced rather than duplicated because that's a waste of money and apart from that like I mean all our development aid work is always from a human rights perspective I don't think that any zero rated incentive should ever be supported from that perspective but like listen to the people here and I think it's great that you're here so that conversation taking it forward is very important but like blunt answer do not support it. Fund the research instead fund the research instead I mean it's really true and I know that for most international development organizations they that would be a natural next step with probably work you've been doing with governments in our context but I would really dissuade against the notion of I don't know if I want to call it developmentalism this the same trope that we've seen with Africa and Latin America this time with the internet is the last public common good I feel that we can actually get on an equal footing the biggest risk you face with probably supporting that kind of work is actually perpetuating the very divides we're trying to close up so that's the best thing I'd say is just fund the research encourage for more dialogue in fact please invite your peers for discussions like these bring them to the table because I can't bring them to the table you can. Thanks I think that was a really fascinating conversation and I mean I well what I would like I would like to ask a couple of things one is you know research I think that's very important but I mean you mentioned your mother who uses WhatsApp I mean your mother wouldn't be interested in the result of the research she probably would be interested in keeping WhatsApp as a free source so what's actually going to happen when the legislation like in Zimbabwe really bends you know zero rated WhatsApp wouldn't there be an outcry in the population and also the question would be what's the alternative I mean you said it would be great if there would be a local development you know as an alternative to WhatsApp or Facebook in South Africa there was mixed which was a local alternative but it's like a cheap version of Facebook so and they stop their services which is you know a pity but maybe that's the cause of time so do you think there is a real possibility that there will ever be a local developed alternative which is not you know as bad in collecting data as Facebook is? Okay it's my mother so I'm gonna go first. Okay next time go for it. Go for it. Okay well thank you thank you for that and I think you do raise a brilliant thought pattern I think I'll still come back to the fact that what I believe is WhatsApp is just by an app but what I want my mom and other moms like her and mothers around the world to have is equal rating they must have access to the internet and probably all of it I suspect that she only loves it because that's all she's ever seen you know of it or that's the easiest she's seen but if I were to let her know because my mom is a teacher the kind of she's her retirement plan is a preschool if she could see all the resources of pictures and video she could get of other kindergartens around the world I'm sure she probably may change her feeling and you brought in the issue of Mixitwitch also closed down I think because I mean the startup space I did kind of follow some of that and I mean a group of one of the founders actually shared the fact that they did fail to compete with behemoths like WhatsApp and there I'll somewhat disagree with them with Nigeria and say for me my feeling is if WhatsApp has gone ahead and they've done well if a local guy doesn't develop something that does what WhatsApp can do there's no point fixing it if it's not broken it's working so if they build something that works better than WhatsApp by all means will support them you know power to the people but if they don't we'll use what is available because after what's been said and done as a startup yourself you know given an opportunity that that is equal you should build something that can be able to compete all by itself and not compete only because someone has given it a leg up and just to add to that will there ever be an alternative we won't find out if WhatsApp is zero rated because there is no incentive to build something else so if we don't have anything else fine but the fact the thing is we need to have the choice if everyone chooses WhatsApp that's fine but give them a choice and with zero rating they don't have it and that's the problem and with equal rating at least you know you give other startups the opportunity and the chance to build something else and I would say there's so much talent out there it is definitely possible like I'm an idealist I do have hope there is alternatives it's just a network effect right so once enough people use it and also governments can regulate certain things so we can make sure that some of the apps that currently exist do respect data protection do respect our privacy and don't store and gather data that is not necessary that's also in the hands of the regulator so there's a lot of things that we can do it's not just about zero rating an app I mean think of it this way do you want to live in a world where one company yields so much power about the things used on the internet because that's exactly what we're working towards this centralization of the web here when we talk about alternatives not necessarily that a local alternative will necessarily do good but it's exactly what Kathleen has said it's the fact that we should have that space that internet that created Facebook that internet that enabled WhatsApp to come to exist that must be the same internet that you know that other entrepreneur that we are housing in the whole the hub elsewhere should be able to make so it's a bit it's a bit dangerous to have one company that benefited from a free full open internet trying to close it down yeah and it's not something that is only related to zero rating because it existed before and it existed with the fact that in many cases Facebook is very popular and it turns out that many web developers started getting less job because people were starting to create Facebook pages for their products and companies and startups and news sites and blogs and everything just on a Facebook page because it looks nice and everyone will go to the Facebook page it's something that needs that needs a broader discussion about the things that we want for our internet and of course when we see that there is money involved in the in in pulsing some services instead of others the discussion gets a bit harder but but it's a discussion that is worth having definitely all right I think time is almost up we have five minutes left if there's last question over there so short answers no it's more of a comment I don't use what's up here so there are two people yeah not to make it it's mostly I'm afraid to sound a negative note on the this big monopolies that we have are created for a reason and it's because people like to be where the friends are and and and this is always going to happen and the companies that have the computing power to run this massive networks are always going to be the ones that are going to be in a better position to push their their tools there is a reason why everyone is on Facebook because their friends are on Facebook so I'm asking what else can we do other than the solutions that you're making maybe to break this up in a more bottom-up way I I've been thinking about this a long time and I have no idea how to do it please save us actually one thing that I really like about the data protection regulation is that there's a class that allows you to take all your data so you can I'm not sure what the exact term is but you can actually have the right when you want to leave Facebook to download all your data and needs to be uploadable to whichever platform you choose afterwards we have no idea how that's going to be implemented yet but it's alright so let's start suing for it and make sure that you know companies have to provide the code that makes it possible to transfer your data because that is actually going to be an amazing tool to break up silos because I'm not going to lose all my pictures and my friends I can take them to the next platform that's awesome I really love that and I really want to see that principle being implemented and it's long now so I really can't wait for the next two years and then afterwards to start seeing that being implemented that's great. Quaritability. Quaritability and I don't think the network effect is always going to be at play but the fact that what we're speaking about here is that we just want the internet to still have that room for other spaces for us to migrate to because it's a I think it's a dangerously scary world when it's one company that still builds the next app so you can see for instance right now with the Snapchat generation they are bypassing Facebook all together right now and they will create their own network effect there but Snapchat only is able to exist because it's a free open internet so that's the baseline we're talking about we must protect that baseline so it's a concerted effort all lovers of WhatsApp can still love WhatsApp please love your WhatsApp but love it while supporting a free and open internet please love it it's so important we give thanks for your love for it but the free and open internet must be the baseline. And I'm just going to say the last thing and say it's a good thing that what used to be called internet.org because of conversations like this they have to change that name to free basics because Facebook is not the internet. Yeah just to add to that the free open internet and the fact that Facebook had to change because of this pressure those are good things and the fact that the network effect exists it's what allow us to fight also back you have to use signal to speak to Kathleen actually that's not an exaggeration. So to protect the baseline is necessary but it's also understood as protecting our rights as users and I mean it's awesome that you have such rules here in Europe but in the third but we do not have such things. We wish we had something as half as good but we still can't push for those it's all about our ability to not just dedicate ourselves to ICT policy because we are concerned about this and this but the underlying values and the underlying human rights that are involved in this kind of decisions and how this is not just about market value or just competition about services but all the underlying ideas and the human rights implications of what we do without technology is after all an extension of our lives in general is not just a separate issue. Great so let's fight for free and open internet. Thank you so much. It's an important. Yeah. Please come talk to us. It's an important issue and we will be around here. We will not reiterate the conversations. Thank you so much.
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The Good, the Bad and the Zero: This panel will explore different examples of zero-rated services across the world, looking into potential products of public interest as well as so-called walled gardens. Featuring speakers from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Chile and the EU, we will compare different regulations and patterns of investment trying to depict and identify strategies of how to increase access without undermining the free and open nature of the Internet which must be governed by human rights.
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10.5446/20713 (DOI)
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Today, in this session, we're going to be talking about the top five things wrong with policy framework for innovation and entrepreneurship and how to fix them. It's a problem that bridges across the entire planet and looking forward to hearing about how these individuals that work on amazing projects have encountered difficulties with innovation policy frameworks and how we can move forward and better address these sort of issues. So without further ado, here's Georgia. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for coming. So in this sunny day, we're going to talk about something we really love, politics, and how to speak bad things about governments, which I'm really excited because I used to be a government girl, so I'm not anymore. So since then, I really like to talk bad things about government, like make some group therapy. Now, I'm kidding. We're actually going to be really proposing things that work or things that don't work. We are part of GEEK, Global Innovation Gathering. I'm sure you were before the last talk, also some GEEK fellows. So I'm going to call my three fellows that are going to be part of the session with me, but we're also going to leave a spare chair. So if you feel like joining, like for specific topics, please come. So we can discuss together. So please come Jay, Martin, and Anjira. Welcome. And then you can just present yourself, maybe. So we made a survey inside the network asking about good and bad practices in the interactions between grassroots innovators, makerspaces, innovation hubs, and governments. And it was some really nice insights. We're not going to share the survey with you, but we took five main points that almost appear in all of the answers. And we're going to share some thoughts about five specific topics. So the first one is text. So I don't know, maybe Anjira wants to start. I mean, a lot of Kenyan people are relented about 17% of hardware taxes for importation. So yeah. So good morning, everyone. And I'm sorry if I sound like... Can you present yourself as well? Absolutely. I'm Anjira Sambuli from Nairobi, Kenya, and I've been working with the innovation hub or the IHUB there. As far as tax goes, it's almost like one of those things that just hurts innovators and entrepreneurs across the board. So from the fact that at the end of it, the little salary you get is going to be charged 30%, even before that, you have issues of how much it actually costs to import, especially for those working in manufacturing. However, I must say that last year we had an impromptu visit by our president to our hub. He literally showed up. And he saw what was happening, and he was talked through, especially around the hardware aspect. One of the big challenges, obviously, when he asked the question was everybody told him, look, it's impossible to import. The import duty for manufacturing is impossible. We don't know if that worked, but hey, when the next budget was read, there was a subsidy. So for people who are working in manufacturing in Kenya right now, to import the parts is the fee subsidized. But it took that. So there are those linkages that we don't know, and we'll get to that later. But that was just one of those situations where I think having seen the evidence from the policy perspective, I think he went and bashed some people's heads, and that happened. We give thanks. But the tax, that was one big hurdle. Obviously there's on the other hand, when you actually, if ever, an income as a company, when you start getting taxed, and I'm sure Jay and Martin will also have perspectives on that. So. Yeah, well, the funny thing about my country, the Philippines, is that we've got one of the highest tax tables in Southeast Asia, and even Asia. That fundamentally is a big challenge. However, I've seen a lot of government incentives that are being put in place. I'm sure that happens as well in different countries. But my opinion is, it seems like an oppressive tax structure that's a challenge for innovators. They try to put band-aid solutions, one after the other. One for ICT incentives, one for entrepreneurial incentives, one for what may be a startup incentive in the future. The problem there is you end up with a monolithic complex structure that's very unwieldy and very costly for the government to maintain, and very costly for the government to educate the people about. So it's sort of like good intentions, but again, the execution sort of blows up. There is one specific case where we have little districts in the Philippines called Barangays, that's sub-municipal level. So the intention, again, is very good. It's closer to the people, it's more grassroots. And there are incentives at that level. The problem is nobody knows about them. And if I knew about them as an entrepreneur, I go to the Barangay office, they don't know anything about it. So that's the type of thing that results out of a very over-complex, over-engineered solution. Does anybody have a good practice that we would like to share about tax assumptions that actually helped? No kidding, you want to say? Thank you. I've come from Recife, that is in northeast of Brazil. And Recife was constructed by the Dutch, so it's a bunch of islands. It used to be a swamp, and one of these islands during the 90s was quite destroyed, the one in the city center, involved with the drug dealing these things. And what the state government was tax-reducing for that part of the city. So every company, every technological company that went to have that building into that part of the city had 2% to pay on tax. But usually, paying Brazil 27% to 31%, and when you have a technological company inside the main island, you pay just 2%. That's quite good. And now there's a lot of innovation and practices and no more drug dealing these things. Quite fast, isn't it? Can we go to the next one? Let's expand a bit. Because it's not just revenue tax that's actually a problem. It's about importing resources, even books. There was a time that technology books had a good tax incentive or break exemption, but for some weird reason in the past couple of years, about 10 years ago, I think, they removed that and suddenly it became expensive to import technical books. So it's both sides. Simple things like Arduino, right? Yes. And Brazil, we pay like five times the Arduino price per time. We have a bit of a bit of a phoenix. So on one hand, yes, they've subsidized import tax, but there's a tax on books, all books. So even students are being taxed. You can't actually, it's really expensive to print books in Kenya. And also for the first five years from 2010, there's a subsidy on mobile phones, VAT value at the tax. That was reintroduced. So on one hand, it's like taking one hand and then giving with another. And so it's exactly what Jay was saying. It's all monolithic and very complex. When you look at it end to end, sometimes it doesn't make sense. So there's a big need, I think, for governments to sit down with innovators in technology and in other spaces and actually talk through these tax regimes and just show them how it just doesn't work out for anybody. Yeah. And it's funny because maybe there's something about being grassroots and small because this picture that I put in my presentation, you know the ducks? Can you see the ducks? Yeah. This was made by big industrials in Brazil because they want less taxes for them. But they already have a lot of less tax, right? Because auto-military industries, they pay almost nothing. So it's nice that governments is investing in the big ones and they still want more. But the small ones, they really have less organization to advocate and put ducks. This is the parliament, right? So they put a lot of ducks and they were calling attention to who pays for the duck because it's the same Brazil, King Pago Pato. And they're saying that they're paying the duck of Brazil. So, you know. Yes, hello. I'm Martin from Colombia. I run Apiario, a network of local innovation hubs in my country. So maybe in the electronics importation in Colombia, exciting things are happening. I will talk later about a digital ecosystem that we are building in Colombia. But in terms of importing electronics, we have a policy that all electronics under around 400 euros have tax exemption. This is a part of a good policy to generate appropriation for the masses, for the base. And basically to import electronics in Colombia, now we have the cheapest electronics in Latin America. So it's cheaper to buy in Colombia that go to United States and buy it. So that's so good. Yeah. Second semester here. Okay, so next point, something that's quite general actually. Wait, it's not working. Okay, go. Red tape, bureaucracy. So this is really something that we get to do in the daily basis. A lot of people in the survey answered like this is the main problem. They think it's the main problem because all the other problems really come through it because you spend more money and we had some answers about people that took one year to open a company. And then for start-up in one year, you're dead already for like eight months. But we also had some people like really answering, you took one or two days. So you do have some nice examples throughout the world, but usually, I don't know, who wants to start? Do you want to talk, Jay? Okay. Well, yeah, it's a universal problem really, but in varying degrees. Starting a corporation or a company back home will normally take you officially about three days to seven days. But in reality, it'll take you almost a month just to get all those permits done. It's the incorporation to start with, tax registration, municipal permits, etc. There's so many. All the way to fire permits, inspection and all that. And it's crazy. So yeah, it's absolutely a big problem back home. People are trying to find ways to solve it. Yeah, acknowledge it. The government. They acknowledge it, definitely. But again, top-down policymaking doesn't necessarily translate to the execution on the ground level. So that's a big challenge. The other scenario would be being a start-up, okay, being in the world of start-ups. You'd want to have the opportunity to close down a start-up if it fails very fast. But trying to go through the solution of a company is very tedious and very tough. And most people, lawyers actually, advise us to just abandon it. Just leave it there. Just leave it there. The X amount of years, it'll just expire, etc. But yeah, those are things that, again, policy has to address. And I'm sure that's the same with other countries. All these things, tax and red tape, it's only forcing, let's say, innovators to go to other countries and incorporate there because it's easier. It's easier to incorporate in Singapore, maybe in Delaware, in the United States. So the government's just shooting themselves in the foot. The session yesterday about ring-ring. Yeah. And the government's just making it more difficult for them. The end result is really negative for them because the hackers will find a way to do this system. Yeah, I mean, bureaucracy is expensive, hey? Because at every level, you're either going to be... It's expensive for the government. It's also expensive to you because you're either going to be bribing somebody or spending... It's an opportunity cost to the time you're going to be lining up. In Kenya, for instance, now they're introducing a cost for registering companies of a certain nominal value. Now, in the scale of it, if you're a small or medium enterprise, you're being charged more than if you're a bigger company. So it's a regime that really just favors bigger companies than smaller ones. And you're absolutely right. What's the incentive then to get into the system from the get-go? So it's just an expensive thing for everybody. It's a loose, loose... Yeah, but they see it as a win, maybe through something in the... Some mud on the wall, hopefully it'll take type of situation. Yeah. Can I say something? I think in Colombia, it's not different. The bureaucracy is high. Open a company is not difficult. You can open a company in two days, basically one day to put the papers and the other day to get an account in your bank. Close the company is not easy. So open is easy, close the company is not easy. But I think it's similar. We need to accelerate all that processes. But yes, open a company in Colombia is not difficult. Two months to eight. Two months to eight? Wow. That's another topic. Flexibility. So a lot of people in that survey answered about there's no legal structure for me because I want to be a social innovator or my business model is different and I don't even know what my business model is. So what should I do? I'm not a company. I'm not a big enterprise. So there's no legal framework for me. So we see that the government are really being slow in answering to these new models that are emerging. And then so this was really like almost 100% of people through all the countries that answered our survey really told us that, yeah, then you have to be, for example, you want to be a non-profit, but you don't want to be an NGO. But you end up like buying your own company so you can have profit and then invest in your non-profit. So it gets really complex. So I don't know. We want to start. Yeah, I think that's a very, very good point. Because for example, I'm part of a business that we say is social business. The social businesses are businesses that are so focused to generate impact, to generate transformation, and to generate profit and to generate sustainability. But we don't have in general, I think, in the world a model for a social business. Or you are a company or you are an NGO. But it's not bad to transform the world and to earn money with that. So I think we need to work more on that flexibility and not only in terms of the legal framework, but in terms of the resources that you use to do your job. For example, if we like to create an SMS service that will send you an SMS to save a life, the telecommunications taxes for that SMS is so high. So you need to pay a lot of taxes to send an SMS that will save a life. Or if you like to generate and to know a voice portal or some kind of services that will change life or educate people. So I think that we need to create maybe more flexibility in terms of the legal agency for the social businesses and the access to the services that we use to create the impact and the work that we do. I'll give a real example of that particular scenario that you were talking about. I think about two years ago, during Typhoon Haiyan, which was really bad, there were some guys that wanted to set up a mapping and disaster location mapping type of thing. And then they relied on an SMS service to send that data to a server and then proper mapping. The problem was not to the government because the government was too busy trying to bring in all these relief goods, etc. The barrier was the big telco because we were in sort of like a duopoly back home and we needed to accommodate both services, right, both brands of telco. One telco, which is the bigger one, blocked the SMS because it was not within the terms of use. So it's not just government that can give you a problem, but it can be big companies as well. And the way I see it is the status quo with this flexibility, with many issues as far as bureaucracies and inefficiencies go, there are beneficiaries. And with this particular issue, you find that in that situation, you even have telcos then who want to ring down, they really want to clamp down on innovators so that you're working under their terms and conditions. So what you find is a case of well, they'll strong arm you and take your idea because then you need to use their service. And so there's a lot of arm twisting that then has to happen because you're relying on their service and they want to look good. They want to be the ones who look good. So you're caught in a situation where you want to do good, but you're at the mercy of either a telco or another bigger company because this rigidity is something they have able to lobby for. So you find, for instance, they will be able to lobby for, I guess, tax relief if they set up foundations. And in those foundations, they'll say especially for those who are tech companies, they will say that they're going to support innovators. But what that essentially means and people who are from the East African region will know, we've seen this before, is that means when they set up funds or competitions or whatnot, they're really just trying to get people at their mercy. They're trying to own the IP. The moment you sign up for competition, they'll tell you they own the IP. So it's really a structure that is not. It's crazy. I mean, it's actually ridiculous because it's their beneficiaries and that one is going to be a tricky one. And I'm super interested in finding out if there are any other countries that are starting to sort of hack that, right? Because the status quo also is benefiting some people. So. Does anybody have one nice story to share about that? Come, come, come, come. Yeah, it's turning into a. What's your name and where you're from? So my name is Paul Mosheny. I'm from Kenya. I also work with Nanjira and I just wanted to add a very good example to what she had mentioned. In Kenya last year, there was a very interesting case between a Bitcoin startup and the existing Telco. And this is the issue here. The existing Telco had a product which is called mobile money that is called M-Pesa. It allows you to buy and sell using a mobile phone and also do other kinds of transactions. But at the same time, the Bitcoin startup also wanted to allow people to transact using a mobile phone and they were running on this existing Telco's infrastructure. So what really happened is that bizarrely the Telco went to the central bank and actually told the central bank to not shut down the Bitcoin startup but to warn people about Bitcoin and to give Bitcoin maybe sort of a bad name. Let's call it condescending name that it is used in child, you know, it's used in child pornography, it's used by criminals, it's all that. So basically that's what the central bank did. And this is actually a very, very good example of whereby an existing company that has its own platform is trying to stop another startup from doing so and it will go to great lengths even to talk to the government to actually help them do that. Thank you. Do you want to share with us? Next one? Yeah. So next one is, I don't even remember. Let's see. That's the one that's to leave. Incentive. So, I'm not sure. So, a lot of people in the survey answer about rent subsidies because a lot of the people in the network of gig are hub managers and the bad part of being a hub manager is about, I mean, first years of paying rent and then we've seen that it works and there are countries that actually have rent subsidies. There was all this research about the China makerspace and how the government is actually subsidizing some rents for makerspaces in China. And so, this is something that a lot of people said, but not only, I mean, I think rent subsidies is only one way of incentive. Like they can have grants or you can have a direct investment. So I think it depends on the case. So I think we have some good examples also to share now about incentives. Yeah. Yeah. Nandita, you. I start. I don't know if I have good examples. Nobody can make a problem. But you can start with better examples. Sorry. Yeah, on this one, it's also very interesting because it's predicated on government incentives being that government has an okay-ish relationship with non-government entities. So of course, one of the big things is people feel like it would be great if rent was subsidized. And I actually agree on that completely because if you're a small hub and you're trying to just rent some space warehouse, so this, that or the other, you're going to have to pay same market rate regardless. But what I've found again is that the incentives that we see with the current government structures again benefit the bigger companies. And in our case, for instance, they benefit foreign companies. So you have company and IBM, for instance, will get better incentives, for instance, to have space than they would use a small startup because A, you know, what the hell are you, the traditional relationship between government and non-government entities. So that political connotation is tricky. On the flip side, I imagine a situation where, say, I help or any other hub got government incentive by way of rent subsidies or grants. Then the perception is government owns your ASS. So I don't know if you can say those words. Yeah, so it's a tricky one, this one. And I think this is one of those cases where I think in Singapore, in China, it's worked out okay, but I'm not very sure about where I fall around what direct linkage government has to these entities. So I think for me, it's more questions and rhetoric than an example. I think it's clear that a lot of the plans or incentives that governments establish are sort of a disconnect with the actual beneficiaries of such incentives. We're not just talking about incentives. I mean, the bureaucracy, the tax, everything that we spoke about. There's really a huge disconnect because you've got people in the government that assume based on maybe an academic study. So next is an academic. Oh, is it? Yeah. Okay, yeah, that's a good intro. But yeah, it's a good example. A good example is Singapore. The government is very active in spurring innovation just because they have so much money in Singapore. And then you have so many programs that are available to entrepreneurs. But then in the early days, because it's a mandated grant, they rush to accept projects or ideas or businesses. And then the quality of these businesses are very questionable. And then around that time... It could be good, but it's not. And so the result was at least at that time was a grand entrepreneur phenomenon. You've got people joining a competition, pitch competition, etc. You're taking the cash. Just for the grant, not for the income. Failing and then trying to create some other idea and then joining again, etc. But I guess according to... Is it better now? Yeah, I heard that. No, it's still the same. It's getting worse. Okay, okay. So monitoring and evaluation are not working in this case. Yeah, unfortunately. It's called competition for notion. Yes, unfortunately, Singapore and Southeast Asia is a model to follow. So if you're actually creating a bad example of policy, but everybody else thinks it's a good example, people will copy it and then you just exponentially create a huge problem. Maybe in terms of incentives, let me explain you a little bit about the digital ecosystem that Columbia is building. Basically the digital ecosystem have four parts. The first one is the infrastructure. So Columbia is investing a lot to give broadband and to give connectivity to entire country. That infrastructure generates services. That services as voice, SMS, geolocation services, different kind of services that are the offer. The offer brings to the demand and for entrepreneurs the possibility to start to create apps. Apps for people. Okay. Apps are the third component and the people are the fourth component. With more apps creating, more people will be using that apps that will grow the infrastructure. With more infrastructure, more service that will generate innovative apps that will attend more people. So basically we are now in the moment to generate appropriation. And one good thing that the government is creating is call it apps.co. If you see on the internet, apps.co is the policy that basically are motivating entrepreneurs to be social entrepreneurs. So basically to create applications for education, for agriculture, for health and for the main vocations that our country, that my country have. So that's very interesting because that is very connected with the science, technology and innovation policy that is no more focused not in research about the moon, about nanotechnology. That's in fact very, very good researchers. But to invest and to research about agriculture, about food, about energy and about our main vocations and the social entrepreneurs and the digital contents entrepreneurs are now in that digital ecosystem and we throw apps.co initiative, thousands of entrepreneurs are now starting to create apps for the base of the parliament. Does anybody want to share something about that? You want to share? Yeah, but you have to come here for an issue. I like this point of Martin. I grew older and I got more anarcho capitalistic here. So okay, if you have great taxes and you have a big amount of the bureaucracy and you have a lot of problems, obviously you convert it in your price and you sell products more expensive for that. So it's like if I pay more taxes, it means that I'm earning more money. I think the focus on the conversation is not the problems that have for this, that is the same almost around the world, but it's the difference that the treatment for the big components and the small components that is around and how this can be treated, how this can be moving and how can we push forward more initiatives of low bottom entrepreneurship. So because the problems for what I see is the same around and it's not if Martin sells a lot, he will pay a lot of taxes, but that's not the point. The point is the duck, just like I said in the beginning. Thanks. So top down on the road. So these guys, I don't know who they are, but probably they're making some really nice rules about us and usually what happens is just they like in a room and the door is closed. So the thing is, how can we foster a bottom up approach? So this is a challenge. Of course I'm making fun. I mean, it's not easy for the government to actually reach out for the grassroots, but I think, I mean, we think that they should and it's the obligation. So how can we call their attention more and how can we participate or co-design policies that actually reflect our universe? How can we reach out because usually what you see is really well intentioned policies that doesn't work or just sometimes are even worse. They screw up the ecosystem, for example, by competing. For example, we have some policies that are built in Brazil, which I mean, one part of it is nice. They are building their own public fab labs, which are nice, but at the same point, like the other fab labs that were already there from civil society, bottom up, they have no incentive, so they're probably going to die because then people don't want to pay for for use if they have a public one. So how can government actually work together with society, not against it? So I don't know if we have any nice examples about bottom up policy, but I think maybe Jay has something that they have been trying to do at least, right, together with the... Yeah, there's one senator that we have, he's quite young, which is the perfect example for a champion in the government because he understands it, or at least he's very interested in it. So through him, we're trying to put together a startup bill. There was a startup roadmap that we actually put together, but again, I'm not a big fan of all these paper roadmaps that you present to government because as soon as you put it on paper, it's obsolete. It's not as flexible as you want it to be. It's already... But again, this person, one of our senators is trying to push a startup bill as a result of coordination with stakeholders in the community. And I think that's a good approach. That's really the approach to do. But again, he's only one person, he's only one senator. We're trying to look for champions within the government bureaucracy. And I know there are because there's some people that have just suddenly implemented an open data initiative and it just happened. So that's definitely one approach. As we were having our pre-panel briefing yesterday, I had some weird ideas about trying to reach out to the senator. Hey, why don't you spend two days with me and just shadow me and see exactly what we go through in an entrepreneurial world? They really have to experience it, learn the jargon, learn the language. We have to have some strategies, right? This is one of those issues that would... If we ever fix it, I think the world will be a better place, but that's going to take a while. Now, on top of that, this speaks to the fact that we can't also just think that our role is to disrupt and it ends there. One of the things I've appreciated working in a hub for the last four years is that this is a very political issue. So you have to know this politicians, you have to engage. Now, a problem I must say on our end is sometimes we take the stance that our work is to disrupt, if the government are not key. But unfortunately, as long as the world is how it is, you do have to engage. So this, for me, what I've learned is this is why we set up I Hub Research, for instance, at I Hub at the time. And this is why not only did we do research, but we started finding entry points for policy engagement because there aren't bodies, at least I don't know if you have any in other countries, bodies that exist to lobby the government for our interests. So we have them for private sector and even for private sector, those that exist for technology are for the big companies. So it's a telcos and they're friends. So there's a need for that and that means time and that means you have to have people on your team. And that means you have to get these people who are policy makers to hang out at the hubs. They have to hang out at the hubs. And I think for me, the value proposition for something like global innovation gathering is also to engage the bodies, regional and international bodies that we know our governments listen to. So when the World Bank makes a recommendation, damn straight, they better be making a recommendation based on what we've influenced them to be. So this is a roundabout thing that needs a multi-pronged and very strategic approach. And it actually also unfortunately means an attitude adjustment on our side that we can't. And so please don't see me and think that because I've ditched the genes for the more suited up thing that I've betrayed the cause, it's really because we have to do this. Somebody has to do this. We can't just be shouting on one end and government can't be over there doing the thing on the other end and nobody's doing the in between. So this one, we all need to reconfigure a little bit. My question is, what, is there really synergy in terms of base between both worlds? Because innovation inherently is changing, it's disrupting, it's rapid. Is there an ideal situation where we can have the government move us fast? Is that something that's possible? Yeah, of course it is, Jay. I'm really optimistic. You know, we have to be there. And it's something that you don't really have a choice, right? This is why actually why we're doing also this session and what we made the survey. Because all the time we meet, we always complain about the government. So I started my session today speaking that we're going to say like therapy group, but it's not the case. I was just kidding. I mean, of course, I think we have to get our hands dirty a bit, like actually shake hands and you know, some of us need, you know, because otherwise we're just going to be like in separate sides and like with a wall. I have a good anecdote though to share. You're familiar with Grab Taxi, that's very popular in Southeast Asia. It's a taxi hailing up. It's like easy taxi here. And then Uber, okay. Apparently, Grab Taxi's approach as they enter a market is that they engage government already at the start to make sure that policies, they try to educate the government, make sure that their policies are all in place, their activities are within those policies. So that's their strategy. They've taken that already. Uber has never taken that. They always do a reactive approach. You know, they come in, you know, the typical disruptor approach. You come in, start your business and then the government pushes back. They're not able to, yeah, so it's reactive. Grab did that. Stripe is doing that. They took a page out of the strategy of Grab Taxi. Stripe the payment gateway. As they enter into markets, they make sure that they engage the government. So that's a positive thing actually. That's a very good point about how to educate our hand-governors and our policy makers about this post-industrial revolution. I think that the most important thing that is happening with a lot of this boom of innovation spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces on all that innovations is that are bottom-up innovations. They are in terms of policy that spaces are creating micro-polices. Micro-polices because no one knows better about the territory than these spaces. So I think that connect the policy makers with the base and enable a way to promote the creation of innovations from the bottom is so interesting. Good appropriation steps are happening in Colombia. For example, we have now 800 new spaces around Colombia, our appropriation spaces in different levels. But now we need to make that spaces more sustainable, to put a methodology, to put contents and to connect that spaces with the main vocations. Maybe not only create innovations for everything, but to connect the innovation with the direct territory. If your context is fishing, for sure that innovation in space should generate innovation for fishing. Your context is agriculture. You could generate innovation for agriculture. So generate a narrative, generate a storytelling for the innovation. It's not only technology. It's a question to connect the contents and to create histories that could transform the territories from the bottom to the top. I actually want to ask a question. How many policy people are left in the room? How many policy people are left in the room? Policy people. Policy people. One. People who work with governments. Who work with the government here? Only two? I'm sorry. Thank you for still hanging out with us, Christine. Thank you for staying. I mean, this speaks. Please, chair. My point, Georgia, my point to this is really part of the problem is that this conversation amongst us here we're preaching to the choir. Right? The few that I knew walked out. So I don't know if we bored them or we spoke a revolutionary term. But it's. So no, my point being, it's super important to figure out what spaces can we bring this policy people. They're going to join us already. Stop pretending just to join us. So part of the top down approach is the fact that which spaces then can they come and listen to us? Which one? Which spaces then can policy makers and advisors to governments come and listen to us? Right? Because in this room again, if we're preaching to the choir. But there's something about like this session. We were supposed to have also someone from ITU, for example, because I thought we were like, we were thinking about the session also. I mean, I think we also have to call them also, you know, and sometimes really go there and take them by the hand, like, please come. Like, it's not easy. I understand what you're saying. But so I think it's, I think it starts from there, right? They have more of them. I think gig does a lot of this, like by bringing like down the golf people around, at least you see, right? Doesn't mean that something is going on, but at least they see. I change your call. We want to share something. Can you give me a few? It's very important, the point that Martin showed here is that we are not doing, we, us, Dan, we are not doing something that is really, oh, it's so grassroots and we are fighting against something. It's valuable. If you know that your territory, this is quite valuable for this, that we saw behind us. So it's, and who, who is a policymaker here? I am. We are. It doesn't matter if you are walking into a state government approach or outside of it. We are always doing it. So if you show the big leaders that it's quite valuable, you are starting to make policies as well with the value that you have in your hands. Yeah, okay. Thanks. So yeah, I'm David. I'm from Switzerland and I'm blogging for the Swiss Startup Association. So that's a lobby organization which is really new. And then we try also to connect startups with them politicians and with the policy makers because we understood that's really important. And that's the only way we can have a voice for startups. So now we are, we have a lot of members like the main Swiss startups are already members. And it's really, okay, Switzerland is a tax paradise for big enterprises, but not for startups. So the problem is startups, they get when they, they, the future value of the startup is already taxed for the entrepreneurs. So that means people have to leave the country because they can't afford these taxes. So now they changed a little bit, but it's still a big problem. And another thing is like people from not EU countries cannot come as workers into the country because it's too complicated to make a contract with them. And yeah, in my opinion, that's the only way that you can have a voice. So startups have to be together and try to, to meet the politicians and make them understand even what the startup is. Because the problem is startups, the value of a startup is so into the, so the value is in the future, you know, like, and, but it's not easy to get politicians because they are also representing small and middle enterprises. And when people or when the government starts to change the tax system, then other enterprises came as well and say, yeah, we are also want to have other tax conditions. And then it gets really complicated. But yeah, what I want to say is you really have to go together and have a voice together. That's the only way. And it's, I think every country should have kind of a startup association, which we have now in Switzerland, to have a voice. And then the stronger and the bigger it gets, then politicians understand, okay, these startups, they do, they, that's the, yeah, they organize, they have, they have, like, they do work, they do work for the future of our country. And that's, then you got them and you are talking about these startups. Look, last year startups had, they built, like, 500 new, let's say, employment, thanks. And then you can bring the politicians on your side and then they start to bring better regulations, but that's the only way. So just work together in every country and have a voice. I mean, and that's, it's, it's wonderful in notion, but one of the things we also have to be honest about is to be very careful to also not be in competition because then the problem with that is becomes who's the superstar who gets the glory. And I think for context, what humbles me is, we're going to be those people in 10 or no one's years. We make it easier for the next generations because it's easy now to be on the other side and just say, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is that and the other, but even as we are doing these things, we have to, I don't know, there's a very conscious decision we have to make that in this, then we don't get caught up in trying to ego, ego trips, you know, like just now it's about me, I'm the superstar, I'm the representative, I'm blocking other voices. There are these things that we have to be awakened to so that as much as we're marching forward, we're not making, we're not just restricting the doors, but actually making it easier for others in the future. Anybody else want to? Yeah, do you want to sit? Yeah, but time. Thank you. So a little bit different approach, but there are some solutions to the problems you mentioned at the beginning, especially to problems with... Can you present yourself first? Oh, sorry. Thanks. I'm not a brother from Poland, but I'm also Estonian irresident, and I think that this is something we can talk about because Estonia is actually trying to create a country to country services, some kind of proxy for countries which aren't ready to host startups, to host small companies, even make spaces. And Estonia isn't trying to become a tax haven, instead they are allowing people from around the world, not connected to Estonia in any way, to set up a virtual company, a totally digital, a bank account, a phone number in Estonia that allows them to access European Union with all those things. And basically it serves as a proxy because the money you raise as a company or FABLAB or whatever your organization is, isn't taxed by Estonian government unless you actually spend money in Estonia. So you can basically use it as a proxy without worrying about all the laws in your local country. So you have to do this tax form, this tax form, this tax form, you only just start paying to your employees or to yourself as your employee in any country in the world, and then Estonia does most of the work for you, just supplying the tax forms, etc. So this may be actually a good idea for small businesses around the world, and I think in about half a year the program will come to a full start because right now the Estonian banks aren't cooperating that good as well. Nevertheless, I think we should just remember that this is an option. Yeah, that's my point earlier. There are ways to make the government problems irrelevant for an industrious person. But again, is that what we want to do? Or is that where the direction that we're really going towards? Yeah, I don't know. This is the last minute, so does anybody have a question? One last one, can St. Jean-Geraldine wants to read something? A blog post? Question? I'm going to sit here because I'm British and scared. I want to kind of defend government in some way because we may not have very many policy makers here, but yesterday at the makerspace, the incredible thing that GIG and the Republic are being able to do, that we've had representatives of the chairperson of the German government aid donor, the person who oversees the policy of the way that German aid gets distributed. We've had a very large number of people from GTZ, the company that works with the aid ministry, to try and figure out how they need to change in order to be able to support this movement more. I think one of the things I've found actually is that whether it's the government in Kenya, the government in Nepal, or even the government in my country, the UK, they have been supporting us in the maker movement to try and find ways to support their healthcare systems and their supply chain issues. Actually their needs to try and spend aid money. My government's desperately trying to find ways to spend its increasing aid budget. So it keeps coming to us saying, would you mind going to this, that and the other meeting. So I think there's some opportunities there. I wanted to try and defend that. The thing that the government really finds hard is what's written behind you. I think they're not quite sure where to put makerspaces or hackspaces or fab labs or the global innovation gathering movement because it transcends the traditional organization of government. So it does water stuff, it does healthcare stuff, it does entrepreneurship stuff, it does education stuff. Where does it fit? I think that's really the policy, trying to figure out where we fit in the policy. You think we should help them, right? Help and understand. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, okay, so prepare a lobby group or whatever to go to government, but then to go with the government with the language that they understand. So what's the income, what's the wealth, what's the changing economy? So if we go there and start a dialogue to see, look, we are doing some wealth, this reflecting economy in this way, in this that way, in the society that way. So I think it's an interface problem that we have. I really don't think government are bad, even though they are, but I don't believe the population are bad, even though they are. So it's this problem of interface that we are facing now that we have to go further and have to have this interface to talk with the government. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's so true what you said, Ricardo, and I totally also agree with what you said, Andrew. From my side, I'm really happy to keep having this conversation, however long it takes. I think we all from our side always open to introduce, to translate, to share. I think the question that one has to ask themselves though, is that sometimes these, the two systems, the governmental systems and the way that we operate, they clash. They clash in culture, they clash in operations. And the question we have to ask ourselves at what point do we, as you said earlier, Jay, just do our thing and not bend over backward to accommodate for the other system. That's a hard balancing act, difficult question, but a question that we need to keep asking ourselves, I think. Yeah. So I think we have to finish. Thank you for that. And as Gerald Jean said, this is an ongoing conversation that we have to keep having and go further with it. Maybe some, create some practices, good practices that are working around the world. You know, maybe together, we have to think more about it, but I think it's only a start. The survey has some nice things as well that I think we have to keep going. So please, if you want to keep doing this conversation as well, look for us here now and we can exchange emails. And I think that really our friend from Switzerland said, I mean, we think we have to unite ourselves and exchange nice ideas. And before we finish, I just wanted to ask Gerald Jean to read a blog post from our friend Tarek. Right. So I wanted to come up on stage and the last hour has gone by so quickly. I think we could keep talking for hours. And we will, like you said. This is an open invitation to join this discussion and the research and the work we're doing and collaborate on this to all of you, whether you're in this room or watching it via video. I wanted to take up the last couple of minutes in this panel to raise one other issue and to talk about a friend who's missing here on stage right now. We organize these international gatherings in different corners of the world, but sometimes or annually here in Germany. And a reoccurring issue that we always have is visas. So being able to travel and being able to meet, being able to work together and collaborate is only possible if you have entry to somebody else's country. This is an issue within individual continents. This is an issue globally. And it's an issue that we're faced with very, very often. I want to name one other case. There's a friend also missing from Tanzania. I had a really hard time with the embassy to prove that he is a horrible German compound noun that I'm probably not going to get right now with his Heimatswiederkehrverpflichtung, something. Basically, because he's self-employed and he's his own boss, what is he going to show for paper? It's not common that everybody has a bank account in Tanzania and neither does he. So it was very, very difficult for him to give proof that he was willing to return to his country. A huge problem for young innovators who want to travel and share their story and work together with others. But yeah, we are going to Skype somebody into the session who we're dealing with missing at Republica. And that is the founder of the Cairo Hacker space, Tarek, and his co-founders, Safad brothers. And sadly, they cannot be here with us today. Tarek would be at least here via Skype right now, but not even that is possible because we were on the phone a couple of minutes ago and he is now on his way to the German embassy who did not only not issue his visa in time. This could be a really elaborate story about how embassies operate. In this case, with a Vodafone operated hotline, which you have to pay money to phone in to get an appointment. After being given an appointment that was too late, like three months down the line, we managed to get him an early appointment, an appointment where they would have allowed him to get his passport and be here on time. But then in the meantime, his passport has been lost. And so he is now on the way to the embassy to find out what happened there after neither the private courier service that this embassy also uses to transfer passports nor the embassy themselves know where it is. And that's why sadly it's not Tarek speaking directly to you now, but myself. This is particularly tragic because some of us, as we've heard today, work under difficult circumstances and some of us work under really, really difficult circumstances. And that is the case of the Cairo Hacker space. I just sent the link of a blog post they just published and I would like to share a couple of paragraphs from that with you to close off the session. So they do a lot of amazing work and feel free to approach us at the maker space later if you want to find out more about it. But yeah, I'm going to read and I'm going to summarize bits of this. You can ask me for the link later. So in November 2015, the Cairo Hacker space was working on an ambitious project to build a mobile maker space that would allow them to visit schools around Egypt. The idea was to spread making and hacking to kids who benefit from learning to use their hands and minds to solve problems creatively at a very early age. The logical of this project was to address the need for better alternative technical and technological education in the country. However, on the 28th of December, the space was shut down after a government interagency raid of the host, the Townhouse Gallery. The motivations for this raid have never been fully clarified, but ultimately resulted in the indefinite ceiling of all Townhouse property, including the studio hosting the Cairo Hacker space. They began to receive a great deal of support for this insert justice, including generous financial offers, but could not accept any of those because of the legal restrictions on foreign funding in Egypt. After about two months in February, the Townhouse partially reopened under very strict conditions, had to comply with new procedures required by government. The Townhouse staff was allowed to access the space, but programming did not resume. They were very thankful that they could at least access the space and get out some of the tools they wanted to really get for this mobile maker space project, so they at least were able to set up this bus that they had already acquired to work on this project. These plans were halted again by a very sudden and very dubious partial collapse of the building in the beginning of April, which I'm sure a lot of you gathered. Like really nobody was hurt at the time, but most of the building was destroyed. Although the space did not completely collapse, it was issued the next day that the government would come to demolish the rest of the building. A sudden demolition order was granted on April 9th to this historic Townhouse building, which includes not only this art gallery, the Townhouse and the Hacker space, but also residential units and other businesses. Like confrontations with the municipalities and just with the tenants, the building was demolished on the morning of April 11th. You can tell I'm getting really emotional about this. There's been crowd of funding initiatives, etc., but as you noticed from this blog post, it's very difficult for people in Egypt to receive any foreign funding or any support that way. In the midst of all this, maybe you can play the video on the side, so I wanted to give you a visual impression of the amazing work they do. Tariq never lost hope. They equip this mobile maker space and want to drive off and teach kids from this mobile space out in different schools, in different localities, in different places, which I think is just absolutely amazing. In this blog post, he specifically thanks everybody, local and international supporters, and promises to be doing the best that they can, hacking the situation. Yeah, I'm devastated that Tariq and his co-founders cannot be with us today. We hope to be able to fly them out later in the week for them to be at least able to join the gig program, or for us to maybe host a workshop with them, some of the workshops that they couldn't give now at the maker space later in this week, if not at Republica, in another venue somewhere. We're collecting donations at the maker space for the Cairo Hacker space, which people can take back to Egypt personally. Please feel free to turn to me if you have any questions about this, and hopefully Tariq will at least be able to watch this video. Let's give them all a really big round of applause for their fantastic work. Thank you. Have a good day, people.
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400% import taxes on hardware, no legal base for co-working, criminalized use of technologies - policies can have a very direct impact on technology entrepreneurs and innovators. The panel will compare and contrast numerous policies from different countries affecting innovation ecosystems and evaluate successful and less successful policies from a grassroots perspective.
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10.5446/20714 (DOI)
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Music So in 1998, I moved to San Francisco and I moved into a small Buddhist temple. And in that temple, the first thing I did is I took all my savings and I bought a small IBM laptop. And my spiritual comrades in that community said, why would you possibly do that? Why would you buy a computer if the community owns one already? So for me, even though working about the internet, I had never really thought about computers beyond individual use in terms of collective ownership. So for me, that was a first encounter to that genuine sharing economy. So over the past five years, now jumping a little bit to the more recent past, we saw the technological ingenuity of the sharing economy deeply resonating with the zeitgeist. So initially, there were projects like couch surfing and blah blah car, which were really about genuine human connection. They were really about underutilized resources and they were really about open data. So just like my Buddhist friends back then, the pioneers of this economy proposed to split their use of lawn mowers, cars, and other belongings, drills. So for them, this was really about a challenge to income inequality and corporate power. But at the same time, we also saw a renaissance of the solidarity economy and social movements. You might remember Occupy. You remember the community land trusts that emerged over the last few years, the credit unions, farmers markets, artists co-ops, tech co-operatives. There's a real renaissance of that over the last few years. But soon, the non-commercial values that were behind these platforms were rewritten in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, turning the sharing economy really into a misnomer. So sharers were being shared and sharing really turned into sharing. Today facing various imaginaries about the future of work, we really need to remind ourselves that there is no unstoppable evolution of this uberization of society. So there's nothing logical or innate about that evolution. So alternatives are absolutely possible and an internet of people is absolutely feasible. So what are some of these competing visions? So in this book, Average is Over, Tyler Cohen, the conservative economist that you may have read in New York Times, or books like Average is Over, for sees a future where a tiny hyper-maritocracy would make millions, while the rest of us struggle to survive on anywhere between $10,000 and $15,000 a year. And so this is supplied by free internet and canned beans. He imagines to work quite well and he points to Mexico where supposedly all of that is working quite nicely already. He grants us that the weather is nicer there, so sleeping outdoors and stuff is kind of easier. But then there's also Carl Fry and Michael Osborn who predict that 40% percent of all jobs are at risk of being automated over the next 20 years. And third, there is the sharing economy which I have no doubt when thinking about platform owners like Travis Kralenik or Jeff Bezos, Lucas B. Wilde of Uber, Amazon and CrowdFlower, that in the absence of government regulation and resistance from workers will simply exploit their undervalued workers. So I'm referring to this as crowd-fleecing. So it's really like what you can see here, it's like a trickle-down effect, right? It's a trickle-down effect of the sharing economy where the profits are trickling down to the platform owners. So I am all on board, right, with Paul Mason and Kathy Weeks as visions for a post-capitalist, post-capitalist, post-work future and universal basic income, we rule the way we think about life opportunities. The final aim is less work, right, and universal basic income. But in the meantime, let's find better work and a bed to sleep in. In the United States, however, unlike in Finland, universal basic income is highly unlikely to become a reality over the next few years. So the question then really becomes, like, what can we do right now with and for that contingent part of the American workforce? This is one-third of the American workforce, 53 million Americans are freelancers and contingent workers, which are all unlikely to see a return of the traditional safety net, the 40-hour work week, and a steady paycheck. So what can we do for them right now? Today's Internet bears little resemblance to the ARPA designed, non-commercial, decentralized, post-spotnik network. Today, we are finding that the sources of entertainment, so when we go switch on the computer in the morning to find entertainment, or to go to work, or to play, to talk, to enter these feedback loops of social networking sites, we find that they are all owned by a handful of people and maybe 50 stockholders in Silicon Valley, and I think that is unacceptable. So we are talking about privacy, we are talking about big data, we are talking about net neutrality, we are talking about access for all, and these are all incredibly important topics, but there is never any talk about ownership. And it's for this reason that I proposed the theory of platform co-operativism in 2014. So workers on demand economy are called upon to live like lions, to be, you know, to un-channel the inner entrepreneur, and to lift the flexibility and autonomy that is promised to them, but with slightly more flexibility also come more risk and harsher taskmasters. The average on demand economy worker earns $7,900 a year through labor platforms, so that shows you also that most of them are part-time. So the question is also, who are really the most vulnerable participants in this economy? Often disregarded are the workers that are actually pushed out by the current on demand workers. So if you think about the Uber drivers, we talk about the workers on Mechanical Turk that are underpaid, but we are very rarely focusing on the people that are pushed out of the market by them. Uber drivers are 40% college educated and far more white than traditional legacy taxi businesses, the drivers in those taxi businesses. Firms are also activated, so we see in addition to all that, in nullification of the law. So the companies knowingly violate city regulations and labor laws, which allows them then to create a consumer base to which they can point and say, see, like this is what we created and all these people just love our service, so probably your laws are arcane and you might want to change them. So firms are also activating their apps-based consumers as a grassroots movement. So we saw this in Barcelona and in New York City, where the mayor tried to curb the number of Uber taxis, and they put in a feature in the app that would basically allow them to lobby to city hall, thereby almost removing the mayor, creating so much pressure. So for every Uber, there is an under, and privacy should also be a concern for workers and customers. Uber is analyzing their routines from their one night stands and to their daily commute to then impose search pricing when they most rely on the service. Think about that next time. You're going on one of those. So there's a navigation of the legal gray zones. These deregulated commerce hubs sometimes misclassify workers, misclassify employees as independent contract workers. They are calling them turkeys, driver partners, rabbits, but never workers. So hidden behind the internet, the curtain of the internet, are these companies that are really trying to pretend that they are tech companies when in fact they are labor companies. So think about that in all of that in this context. In the decade between 2000 and 2010, the median income in the United States declined by 7%, when adjusted for inflation. In 2014, 51% of all Americans made less than $30,000 a year. 76% of them had no savings at all. Since the 70s, we see a concerted effort to move people out of direct employment, and which has led to a steady growth of the number of independent contractors and freelancers. So you can really think of digital labor as a child of the low wage crisis. It's part of this process that took unraveled over the last 40 years, as part of which basically signaled the end of employment. So the past could really easily be our future if you just think about the fact that employment isn't really that old an idea in itself. So I ask, what has the sharing economy really gotten us collectively? Beyond the consumer convenience, of course it's much easier to spend money, right? And if there's also a lot of efficiency in creating short-term profits for a few platform owners, it has demonstrated in terms of social well-being and environmental sustainability, capitalism turns out to be amazingly ineffective in watching out for people. So seemingly overnight, the gains of more than 100 years of labor struggles, so from the Haymarket riots in 1886 to the Shirt Waste Factory in 1911, have been stalled. Seemingly the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 has no pull at all anymore or very little because there are far fewer employees. So among all these problems related to 21st century labor, I think the biggest problem really is that there are so few alternatives. That so few people actually propose alternatives, but there are and I will identify a few approaches. So the first approach is based on the belief of negotiation with corporate owners and with government. The Domestic Workers Alliance in hopes that basically created the good work quote, which allows them to define certain guidelines for digital work, which they then hope platform owners would adapt. So Obama endorsed this, so now they can go to Amazon and say, well, you see Obama like that, so maybe you would like it too. And you can of course hope for regulation. There was this interesting case in the United States right now where a major yogurt producer, Giovanni, decided to turn to worker ownership by giving a large part of his business to his employees, to the workers, in stocks. Seattle imposed the tax on Uber and the teamsters are now representing the Uber drivers in that city. Mayor de Blasio in New York City made attempts to curb the number of Uber taxis in the street and the city of San Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. The third pathway is to take your production out of the market altogether, right? So to remove yourself from the market just like Wikipedia did. Jogai Benkler talked about this and obviously wrote the wealth of networks about this topic. And finally, for the compensated labor market, there's a fourth approach, which is platform co-operativism, to try to say that three times fast, right? Which is a model really of social organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially change what you don't own, right? So my thinking about platform co-operativism owes much to the digital labor conferences at the new school. They started in 2009, so I have worked on this topic since 2008 at least. And this started in 2009 and there were various other conferences and this ended in 2015 or continued up to 2015 where I co-convened platform co-operativism with Nathan Schneider, which drew some 1,500 people. So initially these events were really about labor, commercial surveillance, and artists like Burak Arikan, Alex Rivera, Dimitri Kleiner, Stephanie Rothenberg, theorists like Titianatera Nova, Lisa Nakamura, they all drew public's attention to this digital work, right? But later the discussion became more concerned with crowd-fleecing, the exploitation of thousands of invisible workers in systems like Amazon Mechanical Turk. But at one point I asked myself, you know, do I really want to shine the banister of the sinking Titanic of employment or do I want to look for alternatives? And so I decided to dedicate myself more to looking for alternatives. So the theory of platform co-operativism then has two main tenets, which is communal ownership and democratic governance. It is bringing together 135 years of worker self-management with 170 years of the cooperative movement. So, and as well it's bringing the common space peer production together with those into this digital economy. So the term platform, just to sort of clarify that for, you know, whether the four people among the audience were not geeks, they said basically I'm thinking about places where we hang out and work, tinker and generate value when we switch on our phones or computers. And the cooperativism bit is about ownership models for labor and logistics platforms or online marketplaces that can replace the likes of Uber with cooperatives. So in a nutshell, this slide means to take this technology that Uber and the sharing economy offers, embrace the technology, rip out the corporate heart of it and fuel it with cooperatives and embed the values in the code that those cooperatives would represent. That's the key value. So seriously, because ask yourself, you know, why would a village in Denmark or a town like Marfa in rural Texas generate profits for the 50 people in Silicon Valley who run Airbnb, right? So, and this is exactly what's happening. Why, I mean Berlin just changed that with the recent ruling on Airbnb, but the, you know, why would cities all over the world generate profit for a few people in Silicon Valley instead of creating community value, community wealth through a website that is run by their own city that basically mandates short-term rentals to go to their platform and then have the profits go into their community instead of the beautiful Bay Area. So this is not just a pipe dream. This is, I'm not just walking in Jesus Sandals, as you would say in German. So platform co-ops already exists, right? So this Internet of People is already in the making. There is the cooperatively owned online neighbor brokerage marketplace, Femando, a global decentralized online marketplace owned by its local users, and they are having a pledge right now if you want to become a shareholder, you can go to their website and do that. All imagine a video streaming site that is owned by filmmakers and their fans. All imagine an Uber that is owned by its drivers like the French VTC cap or Arcade City, which is another project. All imagine a global crowd-funded media co-op like Positive News. All imagine a stock photography site owned by the photographers who sell their works on its stock scene. So now after giving you these sort of like really brief examples, let me go a little bit more into detail. So in Brooklyn, where I live, in Sunset Park, there's the Sunset Park Family Center, which basically represents nine cooperatives of low-income immigrants. And here you see one of them in action. So this is Beyond Care, this is a worker of Beyond Care, which is one of these cooperatives. And so they are offering childcare services under the same umbrella as CC Poeta, which is a cooperative that does home cleaning. And then there's also pet care in the same network. So financed by the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City, they created a platform that would help them to compete in the digital market. So the platform is called Co-opify, and it will be launched in the fall. So here you have various problems are solved. So they are looking at how to pay workers who are sometimes undocumented, which means they cannot be paid through credit cards. So they found a way of paying them in cash, even though the site is operated through this app, etc. So you see workers already talking about how their concrete situation can be improved by this project. So basically when the platform will launch, it will let users select the service they need, house cleaning, childcare, or pet care, and workers can basically be empowered through this. So let me talk a little bit about a few reactions to this idea. So in Liberation, Bernhard Stiegler identified public platform cooperativism as one alternative to the urbanization of society. And there were really countless articles from Wired magazine to Le Mans, The Washington Post, The Nation, Shareable Yes Magazine, and Fast Company. And now there are also events, really in very many cities focusing on this topic. From Berlin to London, Bologna, Bremen, Adelaide, Melbourne, Vancouver, Budapest, many other cities. I wrote an introduction to platform cooperativism, and I would have really hoped to have this in German for you. It will be translated and available through the Wurze-Lachsenberg Foundation at the end of May. So for now you have an English version, which will also be translated in all these other languages here. In the summer, I'm launching this book, Überwerkt und Underpaid, How Workers Are Taking Back the Digital Economy, and a second book that I edited with Nathan Schneider, where we ask 60 authors to say, so you want to start an online platform that is cooperative, what do people need to know if they want to do this? So this book is also coming out, both of them in early fall. So also very importantly, my friend and colleague Nathan Schneider created a directory of platform co-op so that we can track this emerging ecosystem. He calls it the Internet of Ownership. So that's also a URL that you can go to. So what is next? Platform co-ops could be attractive options for home health care professionals or pensioners who need extra cash. In the United States, there are 650,000 people who are released from prison every year, who have a very hard time to find well-paid and dignified work. It could be a place for them. It could also be an attractive option for refugees who in countries like Sweden sometimes take up to eight years to find their first job in that new country. So with this model, workers can become collective owners. They no longer have to subscribe to this pathology of this old system that trains them to be followers and Internet users. So few people will feel drawn to any of these kind of abstractions. They are not really convinced by any sort of abstract guidelines or rules. But I think once people are committed, there really have to be some values that people agree upon and guidelines as well. So Eleanor Ostrom, the political scientist, reminded us that aspiring to create alternatives without rigorous study is a pipe dream. So being realistic about cooperative culture is essential. From the history of cooperatives in the United States, we see that we learn that they basically can offer a stable income and a dignified workplace. So these two things you can say from history and from studying this. But we also learned that from this necessary enthusiasm of makers who would do a lot of arm-waving, you also have to find with these really begrudging looking scholars who are really skeptical of all of this. And these two groups really have to talk, right? Because they really can learn from each other. But education and study and research is really an essential cornerstone of platform cooperativism. So first of all, I talked about communal ownership. Second, platform co-ops have to be able to offer income security. In Emilia Romagna, this area of Italy where there are many cooperative businesses, we see far less unemployment than in other areas of Italy. Of course, Mondragon is always given as a successful example in Spain with over 74,000 members as a cooperative. In the United States, cooperative businesses have been very successful in areas like orange juice production, but are also faced with many challenges, right? Competition for multinational giants, public awareness if you have an app, self-exploitation, the network effect, etc. So we need to really also show a transparency of the algorithms, right? This is where they have to distinguish themselves as well. They have to show where the data about customers and workers are stored, to whom they are sold, and for what purpose. So work on platform cooperativism also needs to be co-determined. So from the very first day, the designers have to work with the people for whom they are designing and who they would like to work for that platform. There has to be a protective legal framework and much else. So at its heart, platform cooperativism is really not about any particular technology. It's not about an app, right? It's not about techno-solutionism. It's not about, you know, to change the world click here, as you have said. But it is really about the marriage of cooperativism and the internet, right? The online economy. In the absence of rigorous democratic debates, online labor giants really are producing a version of the future right in front of us. They are producing that right now. And so for us, we really have to move quickly, right? So this is not something where you can say, oh, I was on this panel at three o'clock. Let's put this into our schedule and maybe two years from now we are working on this. No, you know, like this has to be worked on right now. And I think this is also where the urgency we feel in North America, at least, to produce this kind of work comes in. So we need an alliance of cities like Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, who are all pushing back against the sharing economy, right? We need a consortium for platform cooperativism. So you can follow up because there will be very little time for questions. You can follow up and get involved at Stage T at 6.45, where Thomas Dönnebring will head up a workshop on platform cooperativism. There's already a group in Berlin that is dedicated to that. And so you can join us at 6.45 Stage T. So to wrap up, what we really need is a genuine sharing culture, a genuine sharing culture, just like the one that I experienced in that Buddhist center all this time ago, right? We need incubators, small experiments with these kinds of technologies, step-by-step walkthroughs, legal templates for online co-ops. Developers need to write a wordpress of platform cooperativism that can be used to build this free software platform so that not everybody has to reinvent the wheel over and over. And at last, this isn't merely about countering destructive visions of the future. This is really about, like I said, bringing together technology and cooperativism, and then to learn and see what it can do for our children, for our children's children, and for their children into the future. Thank you. Travis Schultz, thank you very much. We have a very short break, about two or three minutes, just to set up the computer, and then we'll back.
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The distrust of the dominant extractive model of the "sharing economy" is growing. Labor and logistics companies such as Uber have been criticized for eliminating democratic values such as accountability, dignity, and rights for workers. Using various examples, Scholz will introduce what he calls platform cooperativism, an Internet based on communal ownership and democratic governance. Let's move the economy in a direction that benefits more citizens. Silicon Valley loves a good disruption; let’s give them one.
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10.5446/20715 (DOI)
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Thank you very much. I hope you can all hear me. Yes, now I can hear myself also over the loudspeakers. Good morning everyone. Two Germans standing on the stage speaking English, but we announced this talk in English because we wanted to have some guests from Britain who unfortunately then couldn't make it. But since it was announced in English, we'll do it in English because I guess we have some international guests here as well. So the way we'll do it is I'll tell you a bit about the case of reporters without borders versus the German intelligence agency BND. Then Ulf will chime in with some information about a strategic litigation and the strategic aspect behind that. And then we'll talk a little more about the specific case of reporters without borders and then we'll have an open Q&A and we won't be talking long. So bear with us while we're setting the stage and then I hope we can have a discussion about the strategicalness of litigation and how we can also make it work here in Germany. Exactly. Okay, so reporters without borders sued the German intelligence agency BND last year in July. The reason we did that was because we are saying that the surveillance that they're doing is first of all overbroad and secondly indiscriminate and on a different count that they're running a database that has no legal grounds in Germany. First part is from what the media reported and found out in Germany and also what the parliamentary inquiry committee, the parliamentary inquiry committee also found out is that in Germany the BND collects millions and millions of emails every year to search them. Now the way they search them is unclear but this is also part of what we'd like to find out by suing them because we hope that we'll get some more information about that. Now what we're assuming though is if millions and millions of emails, especially the ones that are exchanged with foreigners are surveilled in Germany or first of all collected. Now we can talk a lot about what surveillance actually is but they're collected and partly analyzed. Now if that is the case then we claim that there's basically no way that emails from reporters without borders or send to reporters without borders from journalists in foreign countries will not end up in that dragnet. Because there is a specific situation for journalists in Germany we have a very good shield law here. We claim that this is against the law and if it were decided by the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig this is where we had to file the suit against the BND. This is unlawful, this would also have an impact on the practices that the BND is doing in general. So this is the first part. The second part is that they are running this database that is called VERAS, Verkehrs Analyzer System in German, you know, Traffic Analysis System, traffic in of course in the sense of electronic communications traffic. Now the fact that they're running it and it's pretty clear that they're running it and collecting about 500 million sets of metadata each month means that this is data retention. Now there was no legal ground for data retention at the time that we filed the lawsuit and there could be a good discussion about the question of whether now that we have a data retention law again this would make this practice legal. At the time that we filed the lawsuit it on in our opinion it was clearly illegal that they were doing this because data retention was did not have a legal ground in Germany. Now that's the substance of the case and now I'll hand over to Ulf and he'll say a little bit about the strategic litigation. Yeah thanks Matthias for your overview about over the case that you just brought last year. I'd like to invite you to think with me about the role that litigation can play in a whole landscape of advocacy to encourage civil rights. Let's stay with the example that Matthias just brought about the example of surveillance of the internet traffic for example email. The NSA Inquiry Committee of the German Parliament found out that a lot of these surveillance is currently not on any legal basis so there is no statutory authorization for what many German agencies do at this point which is really interesting and concerning but what is the reaction in the political sphere in Germany. Well most politicians think that it's not that bad actually we just have to change the law in a way so that it covers whatever the agencies do so basically you take the example of lawbreakers and then you twist the law to cover what they have been doing and from a civil rights perspective this of course means that civil rights can be diminished by breaking them and Matthias and I and many others in this country think that this is not the way that government agencies should act but the question is how can you actually change their behavior and how can you change politics. If there is no sufficient political will to actually rein in what these agencies do well then maybe you have to twist the political landscape in order to encourage your goals and this is basically where litigation comes into play. You have to think about what success means in the field of litigation. Well of course if you bring a case to a certain court then you want this case to be won. Of course you want the court to agree with what you're writing in your complaint that would be the ideal outcome but let's be realistic this might not be the outcome that you can achieve in just a single lawsuit so you have to be a little bit more modest when it comes to success. For example a lawsuit might get lost in the first the first time you bring it this was the case with the first lawsuit that the lawyer brought that reporters without borders now hired he lost practically the same case with a very well fishy reasoning from the Leipzig court. Let's put it that way. Many many legal experts agree that this reasoning is flawed and so what do they do they don't just give up they bring the case a second time this time with the assistance of reporters without borders. So success doesn't necessarily mean you always win your case but you can already get some kind of legal reasoning in place and then you have you have at least some kind of a legal debate legal scholars might try to address issues might then try to convince courts to decide in a different way in the second instance or you can encourage a public debate. So basically the success that you might have with the case is much broader than just the holding that the court might come to in a first instance. So you have to see lawsuits in a much broader sense than just in the sense of winning a case outright in the first instance it's basically something that you have to embed in a whole strategy in order to encourage civil rights. And now let's talk a bit with Matthias about the strategy that reporter without borders had to bring this particular case. Yeah. What Wolf already mentioned is that as an organization you need to think about a couple of things bringing such a lawsuit. First of all many of you might not know what reporters without borders actually is or does you know many people because of the name it's pretty obvious associate or compare that to doctors without borders but actually reporters without borders is an advocacy organization only. We do have emergency help capacities but this does not mean that we send journalists into crisis areas but we help journalists from crisis areas. For example if they need legal help if they need medical help and things like that. So it's not that we deploy journalists to crisis areas because that is what the media do usually and we try to support that. So the mandate of reporters without borders is freedom of information. Now how do we protect freedom of information as an advocacy organization. We try to raise issues. We try to bring issues into the into the public debate and most of the time these issues are from countries unlike Germany where freedom of information and freedom of expression is under much bigger pressure than it is here. Right. So first what we discussed in our organization was what we want to bring a case in Germany at all because we had to think about whether this is in line with our mandate. You know when we're talking about countries like Syria Iran Vietnam Saudi Arabia can we as an organization really afford or is it the is it the will of our constituency that we bring a case like this. Now we discussed about this for quite some time and then we decided in the end yes that first of all it is because we also have to guard present information freedom in Germany as well. Secondly you know our constituency is here. The people who are members of reporters without borders the people to donate donate to reporters without borders are in Germany. So this is also a reason for an organization like ours to bring a case like this in Germany. Right. The second aspect is as Ulf just said winning the case is probably not the only goal. It's not it's not probably it is certainly not the only goal of a strategic lawsuit like the one we filed because we expect at least on the one count that was already dealt with by the Leipzig court in the past we will probably lose again. You know as Ulf said it was a very strange reasoning that the court gave but there's not really a reason to expect the court to give a better reasoning the next time. You know we'll probably lose on that count. We are a little bit more optimistic on the count of the the legal basis that is not there for the data retention but you know let's let's see what happens. There has been a little legal debate at least. I mean the first decision from the Leipzig court was so bad that many legal scholars published articles about it and journal articles and so there has been criticism and maybe the judges might revisit the question but you're right you never know right but that wouldn't be that wouldn't be the end of the story right. I mean even if you lost again on that count in Leipzig that wouldn't be the end of your lawsuit would it. Exactly and that's the that's the point. We had to think about what do we do if we lose in case we lose because it's not so unlikely that we lose in the in that instance and in that case we will go to the constitutional court in Germany which is well let's let's put it that way in an optimistic framing that is good for two more reasons. First of all we might then win in the end after all right because they might overturn the the ruling of the administrative court. Secondly to have a lawsuit to bring a lawsuit to the constitutional court gives us another opportunity to raise awareness for the issue in the media among advocates and activists and so on and so forth. So this is of course a very important aspect of filing that suit in the first place but at the same time as an organization we have to make sure that for example we really want to dedicate our resources to that because it wouldn't make much sense to go to the court of the I mean it's not the first instance it's already the federal court but it's the administrative court to go there lose and then say okay that's the end of it we tried thanks a lot for you know bearing with us but this is it no of course we have to be prepared to do a step after that and we are prepared to do that. Yeah and I think this is this is a very interesting aspect of what Matthias just said you have to you have to embed your case in a whole communication strategy because of course courts will hand out press releases and even some other pressure groups might hand out press releases but you don't want this to be the end of the story as well you want you want your own viewpoints to be communicated and at least in the German media sphere lawsuits are news so as soon as you bring a case and this case doesn't just concern like a neighbor's dispute then this case will usually be reported on by the media so you can raise awareness for civil rights issues for legal issues for political issues by bringing a lawsuit but if you do it do it in a do it in a proper way so in define a media strategy beforehand have a realistic idea of what success will might mean in this particular case as Matthias said the realistic expectation in this case is they might lose on in Leipzig but they then go to the constitutional court and then they might change the law for the better and I think this is really important have a whole holistic view of that case which is not only a legal case but it's also a communications case and a political case. I'd like to talk about one last issue before we open for questions and discussion and that is the question of standing in Germany because that isn't very I think a very important aspect of this entire strategic litigation idea unlike the United States and unlike Britain as far as I know we have a much harder case here in Germany in many of the problems that we are facing that we need to establish standing with the court that means we have to show that we are really affected by the law that we are trying to overturn or by the decision that we are trying to overturn and this is specifically problematic in our case because it was basically a catch-22 argument that the court made in the first in the first round let's call it the first round you know the similar lawsuit that the lawyer fired two years ago or three years ago the court basically said that he was not at least in one argument that he was not successful in establishing that he was really affected by the law by the surveillance of the German intelligence agency but at the same time of course the German intelligence agency will never tell you whether they surveilled you or not right so what that meant is that basically you have no protection by the law if the court argues like that you know and it shows some or shed some light on one of the most important problems that we have in Germany that there are very few legal areas where we can for example file suits that are similar to a class action lawsuit you know that's basically in most cases impossible in Germany you always have to establish this standing meaning that you were really affected by the law and that is not easy and that means that in strategic litigation you also have to think hard about who is going to file the suit itself yeah that's an interesting aspect because you basically have to build your case you can just like open your eyes and look where there is a great case but you have to have an idea of the legal issues that you want to bring and then you have to hand pick the best plaintiff the best complainant in order to bring a compelling case however the standing requirement that Matthias just mentioned isn't like specific to German law US courts have thrown out surveillance cases as well or have for example thrown out drone strike cases on basis of on the basis of missing standing so this is not specific to German law to the contrary the German constitutional court is relatively more lenient when it comes to the standing requirement for example you do have to prove at least according to the first leipzig decision you do have to approve standing if you want to claim that you have been targeted by surveillance but if you go to the constitutional court then it's sufficient to to bring a compelling argument that you might be concerned by a surveillance law at least if you challenge the law directly if you bring a so-called facial challenge to the law and this is why it is probably so much more promising to end up at the cards war level because they have a different standard requirement okay so much from us I think we talked long enough is there anyone who has any questions regarding that or would like to start a discussion okay we have a moderator doing that if you have a question please stand up yes I could stand up I wonder if this could be a role model for fighting mass surveillance at all in general so what you do is if I understood the right looking at the special rights of journalists and there are special rights about surveillance of journalists in Germany but if they could not guarantee to keep that law they should they way they had to kick the whole thing yeah and as there are other groups in Germany like lawyers or doctors who have the same special laws about surveillance did you ever think about working together with lobbies of those groups you know what I mean yes yes I do I do well from from a let's say let's call it a public relations point of view we've been doing that a lot we have a lot of press releases that we issued where we combined our case or our argument with the argument of for example of lawyers and other people who also have these shield laws yes we've we've been doing that in and as I said or as Ulf already said they're basically parallel cases that we have in Leipzig one is filed by a lawyer and one is filed by a journalist organization the also important and interesting question that you asked is what about the general outcome of this case and especially on the second part of it the one with the metadata collection there it doesn't really I mean our argument does not have anything really to do with journalists or lawyers in that case but we are saying that there are no legal grounds so if this would be accepted by the court unlikely as it is but if this were accepted by the court this would mean that this practice would have to end in general not just for lawyers not just for journalists but in general so yes in many cases in in in these kinds of lawsuits the people who would benefit from the from a positive result from a positive outcome seen from our perspective of course not from the bnds would not be the people who are suing but basically the the general public how is it so unlikely that you could win the case for political reasons i'd call that you know yeah well actually the reason is that a very similar case was already brought by the same lawyer but in his own name like two or three years ago and that was lost on that standing ground that matthew has just lined out so the court would have to revisit this question in order to come to a different outcome this is possible as i said because there has been so much criticism in the legal in the legal realm about the first decision but you know it's it hasn't been so long so it might the court might just find the same reasoning that it found last time but then again reporter without borders would go to the constitutional court and as there is a constitutional guarantee for legal review of administrative action in germany and the leipzig court significantly diminishes this opportunity to seek legal review a court review i think the constitutional court would probably not agree with what the leipzig court held but you never know right and what i meant with that statement you know for political reasons of course judges have a certain idea of how the world is supposed to work and the judges at the federal administrative court in in in leipzig in germany they are not very likely to think that the powers of the bnd should be curtailed that's that's what i'm saying you know they are interpreting a law and they can interpret it this way or that way and then even if some experts afterwards say well that was a bad reasoning you know you still have a probably a negative outcome of the court of the case itself but maybe to add a positive line to to that um the fact that they were so super strict on standing is probably because they know if the case was admissible right if standing was was was agreed on agreed with then um factually the case would probably be lost for the bnd because there is just no legal basis for the surveillance which in itself is kind of an indicator that the case isn't that bad as you might think one final question there's time for one final question hands on please oh we were we were told that we we'd get the five minutes that we started later thank you very much my name is daria i have a question regarding um the lawsuits that have been filed regarding data retention i think it's four different lawsuits already that have gone in um and i think there's some more to come people have announced some more i was wondering with your legal expertise could you maybe tell us a little bit how um they differ from each otherwise it four different ones is it good that there's many lawsuits is it maybe not so good um just your general um view on this well that's a pretty complex question because um the i know one lawsuit pretty well um i don't and only know like the outlines of the others so i can't really compare the reasoning in detail um generally i think it's a good idea if the same legal questions are addressed from different viewpoints so different viewpoints in terms of um professional background societal background uh because that basically enables the cards who are constitutional court to to really see a holistic picture of the issues at stake in this case um but on the other hand you want to coordinate your cases and this is why i'm a little bit skeptical for example about the case that is still about to be brought by digital courage for example because they did not really coordinate with the others um and they they raised a lot of money where nobody really knows where it's going um and this lawsuit is still in the making uh they are kind of like desperately looking for input on the internet and this looks a little bit scary to me to be quite honest you should if you bring such a case and especially if you if you launch a PR campaign about such a case then you want to be sure that you're gonna have the means to follow up on your promises right but the first four case four cases i think demonstrate that it's possibly a possible to bring a very good constitutional case even without um enormous funding because they the others did not really um start a large crowdfunding campaign you do need money of course but in germany for example you need significantly less money than in other countries so um a low um like 10 to 20 000 euros is a significant amount of money to bring a compelling case and this is basically a great opportunity because in the u k for example you would have to spend about 10 times as much to to hire the lawyers and to bring such a case well this is these are estimates right um but and when it comes to the uh outcome of the case i really don't know because there is a large probability that the case will have to be referred to um the european court of justice um because there has been a decision last year about data retention maybe the constitutional court in carlsworth says well we want to have their opinion on what the german legislator did this time um maybe not they are not compelled to but there is a large probability that they have a might do that um but nobody knows what the what the european courts would do so i think it's it's good that the cases have been brought uh it would have been even better if the cases had been coordinated um more closely and the outcome is really not to be known so far thanks one remark or one thing i'd like to add and i'm not ashamed to do this here because uf just started to talk about money uh these lawsuits cost money and also it's very important to get some public um help with that some assistance we have a petition on our website on the german reporters without borders website that you can sign to um to to show that you also think that this law should be turned around or turned over um so please everyone who speaks german and who wants to support us there go to our website uh reporters without borders germany and sign the petition it's easy to find uh and secondly you know if you yourself want to or if you know some friends who would like to do that uh you can join the organization you can become a member of reporters without borders and you can also donate money and you can of course say that uh this these donations should go to um the costs of this of these strategic litigation cases that we have because you know it's that's that's what it comes down to we always need resources and money to fight these cases even if the outcome are then positive for everyone for the entire um or specifically because the outcomes could be good for everyone and not only the journalists among ourselves yeah just just think where you put your money i just signed up for a membership of reporter without borders for thank you very much so i think this is this is a good cause that they are having uh but choose your uh um your donation company wisely that's fine uh thank you both very much for being here um i forgot one thing i highly recommend to listen to oof's podcast the lager denation as well for for the information and i'm sure that the speakers can be approached aside of the stage totally thank you very much and see you soon again
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Government oversight over intelligence agencies is often toothless. Therefore, courts are the last resort to turn to, and in many cases they have been much more aggressive than politicians in curtailing surveillance agencies’ powers. We will present the latest developments in cases like Reporters without Borders vs. BND and UK groups vs. GCHQ. We will also discuss and develop new ideas for strategic litigation in order to defend civil liberties on as many fronts as possible.
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10.5446/20722 (DOI)
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So, our next session deals with wellness as tactics. Actually, we see so many glossy, nice pictures online on the time on social media. And these two women actually think about what influence these have on culture, society, on health. And yeah, with no further ado, I would like to introduce Andrea Götzke, cultural producer and curator of various events. And Cecilia Palma, designer and developer for fashion and web, and they will perform a dialogue. I'm very curious to hear what this will be about. Thank you. So, hi. Welcome. And thank you for coming for this one of the last slots of the Republica. Be here with us. And this is not the first time. We are waiting for this. We are waiting. We can start. Well, yes. No. So, we're here to talk about wellness and aesthetics. And beauty and its complications on further areas in society. But to start with ourselves. Well, we both like to feel good, to eat well, be healthy, take care of ourselves. I mean, basically, we like wellness. And it does make sense to take care for yourself. Also, we love glossy surfaces, facial creams, and this pampering. And so, as you can see, we prepared this slideshow for you with pictures that we enjoy. So we hope you enjoy too. Yeah, actually, this idea to do this talk was a bit inspired by a visit to the spa of mine at the beginning of the year, around the time when you had to submit the papers. And I was like floating there in the outdoor pool. It's a spa that opened near Hauptbahnhof for those of you who are from Berlin who might have been there. And thinking about how this whole wellness temple landscape is maybe less about the body in a natural sense in a way, but shares lots of aesthetics with technology or airports or something. It's about total seamlessness, convenience, glossiness. And so, Yoga Studio and the Mac Store are not so far apart somehow aesthetically. Yes. And so, what is this wellness aesthetic we're talking about? As you said, it's this glossy, seamless appearance. And it has something which is real, but in an unreal way. Kind of beautiful. Well, it's kind of beautiful. It's like creating nature and chaos, romanticism and tech together. Pretty. And most of all, maybe unproblematic. There was this quote just up there that we put up from the Berlin-based philosopher, Björn Schollhahn, who published a book last year about beauty. And he discusses in a quite romantic way, I feel like different philosophers approach just to beauty. And he starts out in the first chapter talking about glossiness. And he uses examples of Jeff Koons, the balloon dog, also of iPhones. And he writes how the glossy, like bags for the like, you want to touch it, you mirror yourself in it. And at the same time, it kind of eliminates the differentness or negativity of the other. This is how he writes it. So there's not really, it's just positive. There's no real space for a spot. Or if there is a spot, it's really a problem. Yeah, but this is also, I think, I remember, we used to have a method for this when I was younger, when I was in school. Because basically, like, if you would, and I know it might still be around, like, I don't know, with the kids. If you say something negative to me, I can put up my hand as a mirror to you. And it just bounces right up back to you. So I just go mirror, mirror, and anything you tell me will just be about you. So like, don't be a hater. I want to be happy. Which brings us to the topic of happiness. Kind of the next chapter in our scripted, unmoderated dialogue here. So I'm the one who is quoting the books today. There is this book also published last year by Carl Ziedersstrom and Andres Byser. And that's called the Wellness Syndrome. And they talk at length in that book about a thing that they call the happiness doctrine. Coming from the idea of neoliberal self-optimization, so the internalization of control. You don't have an outside person to tell you, oh, no, you have to do this or that. It's all in such a self, you tell yourself to be productive and to be good and all this. And they outline with many different examples how this doctrine to be happy and well, meaning healthy and fits into the self-optimization thing and how the wellness command transforms every activity, including eating and sleeping, into an opportunity to optimize pleasure and to become more productive. And they use many examples, like mostly from the US, UK and Scandinavia, from wellness contracts that you sign when you enter a university at several universities in the US where you say, okay, I sign that I'm going to work out and eat healthy and so on, to various positive thinking books and the proliferation of life coaching, like all over the place. And how everyone for themselves pursues the perfect human and also how health and happiness are always a choice for yourself that you can pursue. You can always choose to do that. And the results, that's their conclusion of this pressure to constantly be happy and have an enjoyable day and of this narrative actually causes lots of anxieties and feelings of guilt. Because by all means trying to be happy does not make you so happy after all. So while you can have a positive attitude to life, that doesn't mean that you always actually feel happy because this is more something that kind of happens to you. It's not something that you can really force on yourself. And this also connects back to the experience at the spa, which was just, when I was there, it was offering so many yogurt peeling, honey and fusion, water beds, like so many things that had kind of a spa, formal moment there where I just felt like I could not really relax because I was constantly torn between the different things that I could do to just feel better. And I think it's also an environment where you're supposed to be happy. But I think it's as well, I guess, you know, in life as you're changing between the screen and then going outside, seeing real people, going back to the screen. You quickly get accustomed to this, to the interface, to the digital interface where everything, where it sends to work, where you can push buttons and everything is smooth and it looks good. And it goes to a point where sometimes you get accustomed to this so then when you go outside, it's not like the user interface of life just sometimes really sucks. But you have already built up this expectation that things should just be work and be really nice to you and then you have this gap between technology and real life that becomes problematic. And then I think when we're talking about the self, we also need to talk about our homes because it's just become this extension of ourselves and it's just as it's important to like grooming is important for self presentation and everything. Tidying and cleaning at home has become very important. And for example, you might be familiar with this Japanese author called Marie Kondo, who's she's written several books about organizing and tidying, especially through this bestseller called the life changing magic of tidying up that's sold in many languages in many countries. It's also put her to Time Magazine's list of 100 most influential people last year. And she has this method, which is central to this method called the Konmari method. It is that you go through your things and you only keep those things that spark joy. So it is about organizing and being clean, but it also is about being happy and to just have happy nice things. So basically you just, you know, it's also about detoxing everything so that everything that is not desirable comes out of the way. And well, bringing this back to health, you can, the thing is that you can always do better. This is and choose to do better. And this, I mean, this is nothing new, of course. It's in a paper by Siegmund Baumann, who also spoke here last year at the Republika. He refers or he writes in a paper from 1998 about the differences that he sees between health and fitness, kind of seeing health as something that has more objective criteria. But against this is fitness. Fitness is never done. There's no objective criteria. You set the goals yourself and you can always improve. Yeah. And it's also, I'm noticing like among all the positive, the positive thinking and the good vibes and the improving ourselves. I, I mean lately, like maybe the last two years, I, so I thought I didn't have to work on that. I suddenly I thought, which kind of sucks, of course, because supposed to be like that. But then I really, because it must start itself. When I was criticizing things, to know kind of pollute the mental environment of the person I was talking with. And this came up because we were talking about things and criticizing a lot. And I realized like, well, actually I didn't, I maybe I didn't change, but maybe, or was it me who changed or was it the surroundings that changed and that this criticizing things is just not so welcome. One, one more thing I'd like to add to this. Also going back to health. And this is also another example from that, the book, the wellness syndrome that I mentioned earlier. I think it becomes kind of problematic where health becomes kind of a moral category. For example, in several clinics in the US, it's not, they changed like from forbidding to smoke at the workplace to not hiring smokers. So it becomes like from a habit to going back to the actual person. So if you're a smoker, you just cannot work here. So you're a bad person kind of, you can't. So it's, yeah, it's not a thing of personal choice, but it comes something that is for your whole personality. Yeah, and that it's not that it's about that you, that it feels good to be healthy, which ultimately it does. And I think that is a good reason to be healthy, but that it's so much more. This about being a better person. And also, for example, to go back to this Marie Kondo and extreme tidying and decluttering is like the opposite of decluttering and tidying, which will be hoarding stuff is something which is extremely shameful. Like you have reality TV shows exploiting this topic. Well, basically of hoarding stuff, also other things of eating too much of having too much depth and just having too much of stuff. And with this implication that basically eating too much, eating too bad, having too much, something that makes you morally inferior. And it's something that allows other people to laugh about you. So I think it becomes problematic as I mean, it's, of course, I like to live healthy, but it's a thing it becomes problematic at a point where self optimization, including wellness and happiness is in the ultimate service of productivity and efficiency. I think this is where kind of the breaking point is. And yeah, I mean, of course, it's not your personal issue. You're costing everyone money when you're sick and everybody else is trying to stay healthy. Well, possibly. Well, so I also, I recently read an article with some examples from Swedish companies that have had introduced not only fitness in the workplace, but mandatory fitness and workout. So that people, if you work there, well, basically you have to do, you have to do exercise during work time. And the most extreme case was a water company where it would even have a negative influence on your salary if you would not comply and do your exercise. Or it would basically would raise less if you wouldn't take part in this. And I think this is also raises questions like such, like with the whole productivity thing is like, who does the body belong to? Is it an especially like in such a situation with an employer and employee whose body is it? Also, more and more companies are offering mindfulness workshops or relaxation or meditation classes at work. And one could, I mean, while, of course, this is a nice thing, one could also argue that structural problems at the workplace are being turned onto the individual. So if you have lots of stress at work, you know, you go to meditation class, you know, and just feel better about it. Yes. And by all means, like you don't need to don't join the union, but go to yoga. Because it will, you know, it will be the quicker way to make you feel better about your work situation. There on one of the slides before there was a quote that actually is from a work contract that I have signed, which is in the standard work contract nowadays, it says that you're supposed to improve your health when you're sick. So I mean, you're at home, but still kind of your behavior kind of belongs to the workplace. Yeah. And it's those things, I think I see this a parallel to what in the earlier times of me during the industrialization or especially in the early 1900s, there was this methodology called Taylorism was an early form of scientific management to improve productivity on the work floor and improve processes. So this was during the time when you went from craft production to mass production. And it basically, what it was about changing the workflows and the tasks that workers had. And it has, I mean, this, the Taylorism way of doing things, it changed a lot of things, but it's also been abandoned since maybe the thirties and some places later, and also a lot criticizing for alienating workers and just not giving them the same agency that they might have had before us craftsmen and so on. And yeah, and this is the thing that like the whole thing as a with wellness seems to be like this fresh new thing, especially in the workplace. And it's so great, you know, when an employer enables people to do, take care for themselves during work time. But I think it's also somehow it's in the end, it's just a new form of doing the same thing of raising productivity, because it's ultimately not about people individually to feel better. It's just about to create workers that work more effectively. So yeah, it's about trying this whole, what we talked about trying to be the perfect human and the wellness improvement and glossy aesthetics relate in that sense very much to the technologically enhanced human or the technology replacing the two human parts of the human. Exactly. And it's also, I mean, it's a lot of treating the body like a machine that you can, you can enhance and you can you can pimp it and improve it. And it's also like this, the wellness idea, it's connected a lot to enhancement and to the technologically enhanced body. And it's basically, you know, it takes us also a little bit closer to cyborgs, and we can have functional food as fuels for like this machine. And it's just to remove some of the human factors and just like improve the machinery of our bodies. So technology and medicine improving the human body and human life is very great, though. And I would not want to miss it. Also to self-improve, to practice something, to become really amazing at something is really good. No, I think that is also great. And I mean, I also, I go to yoga because I feel better and also in my mind and in my body and doing these things. And I would definitely like advocate for them. And I think also, I use things like the Nike running up, I think that's really fun, although it's kind of weird that I couldn't see where I'm, and they can see where I'm going and those things. But at the same time, I think it's like this, basically like we have like the whole idea of like the quantified self and self tracking using, you know, with a Fitbit or anything else and a kind of fitness tracker. I think there's someone on another level, there's also a way of simplifying a lot of complex complexity of being human. Like, I mean, you have a body, it gives you signals and it shows you things. But it's much easier to get a data set, like that you have data points that will tell you something instead of having to feel and pick up on signals from your body. So do I feel full or does my blood sugar level measure as saturated? Exactly. And maybe it is also like, is your feeling correct or is the other thing wrong if they don't match up? So we're talking a lot about human. So we are thinking more human than post human kind of in a way. I had one quote up that came before it from a test card magazine article that I really recommend to read which is about a simulated conversation between artificial intelligence and the human and where it says that we are using technology to build a world where humans cannot be sinful, lazy or imperfect but where you can either function or disturb. Yeah. And yeah, this is the thing. It doesn't want to leave so much space for other things, I think, because it wouldn't be so convenient. And basically, I would also refer here a little bit to Maya sitting here. She just gave a very interesting talk about self-driving car and ethics an hour or so ago. And basically it's a thing, you know, it's super convenient as long as the cars are just, as long as if there's a self-driving car, everything will work, but it's not. And it's problematic. And this is the same thing, I think, with this whole idea, like with this whole glossiness. It's like it's very fragile and it's easy to break the system. And there is, I think, also with the fitness trackers, it's also a question of what are they tracking? I mean, I know they track a lot of things, a lot of bio data. But I mean, do they also, do they track which books you read lately? Do they track when was the last time you spoke up for yourself or for someone else or the last time, like how often you care for other people? Because it's all like stuff, it's super important. It's very healthy. It's very important for intellectual hygiene and mental well-being and those things. And this is just factors that don't get in, but I would say that they are at least as important as your heart rate on the big picture and also just for health. So yeah, I would agree on that. I think we start another topic that we plan to talk about. We may be stretching it a bit with that, but we still want to do it. So we talked about the anxiety and pressure to be well and about the perfect body and so on. And a problematic step further that we discussed about when we prepared this topic is the expectation to be well. On this topic, we found some pictures that you've already seen on the screen from an exhibition called Swiminal Politics that was published in this magazine and that was inspired by the anticipatory aesthetics of the swimming pool on the Greek island of Zamos where tourists on the beach meet refugee life jackets and where this expectation to be well clashes with reality. Yes, and there is, I think, I mean, that exhibition is showing that really well and also like on this friction in between those two, the two worlds. Like the convenient part and just the problematic real shit. And yeah, it's the same. I think that's on a, I mean, you have this on a technology level, technology level, you expect things to work seamlessly and when you have this expectation, you don't want to be let down. It's very easy to be very annoyed as soon as something doesn't load fast enough, the internet goes down or the same thing, it's the same thing. Like if you're in traffic, it's very annoying when there's roadblocks, even if, I mean, you could expect them to be there because it's a part of like normal maintenance is that you have to kind of dig holes and renew the road to keep it working and that those obstacles is just part of the game. And still it's really easy to be annoyed because there's something that gets into your way so it's not seamless. And that's, I think, I would say that many people are ready to pay quite a lot for that quality for that seamlessness, especially in the terms of well hardware, software, products that we use. And I mean, then either you like pay in cash or maybe more often like to pay with personal data because well, it has a price, but then you know, it's worth it because you get this nice experience. I think what we're talking about is of course about like a privilege where like wellness is a privilege and what I find problematic is that lots of people have the opinion that we have the right to this to wellness and to our standard of living. Like feel like kind of an entitlement to be well. I think this is like the ultimate thing what we talk about, why other people like for example outside of Europe don't have this to the same degree, this right. Yeah. So then following that logic. You mean that you can also say that for example, it would then also be okay to keep refugees outside of our country or the EU and then we could call that a solution. Like as soon as it doesn't, a situation messes up too much and we can keep our country clean and well in order. Or when people are discussing like can you actually travel to that country or is it just too dirty? Well, that always makes me angry, I mean, well, I'm totally against like poverty tourism or something, but these comments make me angry because there are usually like 10,000 people living in those places where those people talk about it's too much to bear to go there. And I heard an interesting talk last year, a lecture at House d'Equarture in der Welt here last year by Marina Greenitz, Slovenian philosopher, which talked about the different approaches to politics for people within like those productively contributing and those outside like outside the EU, outside of productivity. So it's biopolitics be more human than human in for within and necropolitics so you can die because you are still too human. This is maybe too short. You can also look this up. It's interesting. Like talk from her. Yeah. So it's also a matter of power, strength and privilege. And I think from here we have to wrap up to the conclusion quite quickly. Oh, really? Three minutes. Yeah. So basically to conclude, what is the problem then with convenience? It's great. I mean, love it. It's nice. And this is what it's because I'll take this example quickly also. It's like if you call me on a day that I plan everything really well. And I'm a really good productive human. So I work and I feel good. And then you as my friend, you call me and you have a problem. Like of course I want to be there for you begin to help you out and to be a friend. But it really messes up my day. And it's totally inconvenient. And it's sometimes so annoying. So I think, I mean, we're not going to provide the 10 point conclusion because this is exactly what we're criticizing. But maybe we like one further thought in another article in the Guardian, there was recently about the ancient Chinese philosophers. Not that I'm an expert on this like this confuzius or Laozi or so. They were also about talking about becoming better persons, improving yourself. But however, it was more by looking outward, like by recognizing that we are complex creatures constantly pulled in different directions. As it's through working on interactions, experiences and responses that we grow. So it's like recognizing complexity and learning to deal with that. And this is how we improve. Yes, exactly. And I think it's also like maybe you've seen this quote, but it's guy called Söderström, who also wrote the Wellness Syndrome. Who said, when we can no longer influence the development of society, we tend to turn the focus inwards to ourselves. And I think often you can see that symptom also happening with people. Yeah, and I think it's also, I mean, convenience is a great thing and it's great to design processes to be more efficient in daily life, to be more smooth in interaction with other people. But there has to be a place in that narrative as well for like for critical thinking, for dissidents and in debate and not leave it out. So yeah, I think also, I think actually like seeing several talks the past days, I think this notion came through like several in several of the talks that it's about that it's a problem that complexity is kind of being designed away. Richard Sennett, for example, ended his talk on Monday with the sentence, tensions open people up, not comfort. And I think we would kind of conclude that it's, it makes more, like it's important to recognize that there are problems. It's important to recognize the other, like also as something disturbing, but you know, deal with the disturbing thing. It's better than trying to clean everything away and makes you happier after all if you know you're going to be disturbed. Yeah, and deal with the complexity and enjoy the complexity. So, so except the crack in the mirror that somehow is wears on our slides, but they're kind of stopped showing. We had some, yeah, I think it's because we have to go. Okay. Okay. Good. But that's it. You only missed that last slide. That was really good on that. But yeah, it's not. Oh, no, it's broken. It was broken. It was broken glass on the floor. Okay. final comment and don't forget, come to Sarah's Nikolaide Just for $10.
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Wellness aesthetics and glossy technological interfaces share an appeal of convenience. Health apps cater to our wish to wellbeing. #grateful is a popular hashtag on instagram. There is a solution to everything. We all strive to be happy. Look into the mirror - you can make it. In this performative dialogue we analyze the wellness aesthetic and associated technologies, images and narratives - and how they make us pretty unwell as a society (including some guilty pleasures and beautiful pictures).
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10.5446/36879 (DOI)
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Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to Europe-Ice in 2014. I hope you all had a great morning and like us, can't wait to start with Europe-Ice in 2014. First I want to introduce us. This is Tony. My name is Karina. We will lead a little bit through Europe-Ice and by giving some organizational updates every morning so that you're always up to date what's happening. And so we just start with this today. All right. So the first news are kind of sad because you didn't get your guidebooks yet. The guidebooks are going to be around tomorrow and you can pick them up probably around noon from the desk. If you need some offline material to look at the conference schedule, there are displays around in the foyer, in the entrance and in the basement. If you need wireless, if you need Wi-Fi, the SSID that you should be using is EP14 and the password is EuroPython2014 with a capital E, capital P. This is going to be in the guidebook and it's going to be printed around all the place but if you're missing it right now, EuroPython2014, capital E, capital P. So I see some of you already got their bags with the t-shirts. If you now decide that you perhaps choose the wrong t-shirt size, it is possible to switch the t-shirt but just tomorrow after the lunch break before it's not possible. Also you can't take a bag before with you then because yeah, we have to make sure that everybody gets a fresh t-shirt and we can't guarantee then if somebody brings it back that it's not already worn so we don't want to have that. So if you want to change your mind about your t-shirt size, just come back tomorrow afternoon to the t-shirt desk which then will be at the info desk. All right, that's already from us. I want to introduce you to the chair of EuroPython 2014, Mike Miller. Thank you very much for the introduction. Good morning everybody and I also would like you to welcome to EuroPython 2014 whether European-Python community meets. First to remind you, we are in Berlin. Welcome to Berlin and it's the year 2014. And obviously you found a place that I don't need to introduce the place to you. First I want to start a little bit looking back. The EuroPython since 2002 and then I discovered some data about this conference at the EuroPython Society website and I used this data. And I like to program and this is why I put a little bit of programming in this talk and actually this whole talk is written in an iPython notebook and so there is this data there. And this is the last EuroPython over the last years. This year is starting 2002 location in 10Ds. Unfortunately we don't have data for all the times but we have a few. But this is just the numbers but now you use a little bit of Python, we re-answer data and put them in dictionaries and after we do this we can plot them very easily. It looks like this after we put in a dictionary and then you have a nice plot with Matplot live and that's how the development over the end of the year went over the last years. See we are rising. A lot of people are coming to the conference and this conference has a whopping 1200 participants. Okay, so much about the past but we want to look at the future and look at the next week. And first I would like to invite Fabio Klichor, the chairman of the EuroPython Society to say a few words and say hello also. Hi everybody. I hope you are doing well and I would like just two words to say that I am really happy to see all the people here. You can see but it's a lot of people. And actually I will take a picture and tweet that. Okay. Hands up. That's nice. And I'm the current chairman of the EuroPython Society and the EuroPython Society is basically a society founded 10 years ago to help to maintain the carrier of the EuroPython conference during the years to maintain the way the EuroPython conference is set to keep it a community conference, an open conference. And our job now is to try and do this as the conference scale. And for us to do this we really need your help and we cannot do that by ourselves and we would like the community, the EuroPython community to be as open as it could, the more open as it can and for that come, become a member, be part of the conference and help us to keep scaling and to keep the same kind of conference. The next days on Thursday we will be presenting the PSF and presenting the new ideas, the EuroPython Society, sorry, and the new idea we have in mind to keep the conference serious. So come and join us. Thank you. Thank you very much. So do become a member of the EuroPython Society. And that's what we're going to do the next days. That's a program that doesn't even fit on the slide, there's even more, but I want to go through quickly what you can expect. Of course the main part or big part of the conference are the talks. So we have five prior tracks of talks. We had about 300 submissions, 300 people want to speak. Unfortunately we have only room for 100, so that means we had a pretty strong review process and you can expect very high quality talks. So you saw it already in the program. It would be very interesting talks. I would like to call all of them. But they all will be on video so you can watch them later. Also about the talks I have a call. So we need people to help us to run this conference. It's a very big conference and we need session chairs. So if you are interested and would like to be session chairs, session chairs are the person who attend, helps the three speakers or how many are in the session. And please sign up, go to this website or if you cannot write it down, ask at the info desk about becoming a session chair. So it would be very helpful because we need people to help us with the conference. Also if you are a speaker just a short announcement, there's a speaker preparation room in CO3 that's up here. It sees this level up here. So if you need to prepare for your talk, you need some quiet room, then you have to speak over. But please become a session chair. That would help us a lot. It's not a lot of work, it's just one session and then you are done. It's a help for the conference. Training sessions. So we have training sessions. There are two parallel training tracks. So very interesting trainings. They are about three hours. So if you want to get a bit deeper on the topic, then a talk, then the training is the way to go. But you need to sign up. So you had a chance to do online sign up before you might have seen it. If you haven't done so, please go down to the info desk and sign up. If you sign up and you are on a list, you are guaranteed to have a seat. If you don't sign up, you might not get a seat in the training. I might not see you in space, you might be lucky, but if you really want to see a training, please sign up. That helps you and helps us also to plan a bit about the rooms and stuff like this. So please take advantage of those interesting trainings and sign up for the training session, for your favorite training sessions. So we have a lot of things going on. One of the things going on right now today, the Jungle Girls workshop. Yes. Right now at the base level, there is about 40 women learning programming with Python and Django. We had about more than 300 applications for this, but we have limited room obviously because we have a two-tour student range of one to three. So we have limited room and limited two-tours for sure. And therefore, we could only select a fraction of them, but it's a small sort of event, so it's free for the participants. It's just once there's a whole application, they don't have to pay for it, which is a great thing. Keynotes. There will be a lot of keynotes. We start with two keynotes today, and I just put like a hashtag here. So today, we will hear keynotes about Snowden. I just put Snowden there. Everybody knows what it means. Haskell, test-driven development, something about decentralized systems and big data. These are the keynotes we want to enjoy over the week. And you see the keynote speakers. I'm not going to introduce them right now. That will be done right after me when the next keynote comes. Lightning talks are very interesting, though if you don't know lightning talks, it's very short, five minutes per talk, and it's very short. There's no answer question thing, question-answer thing. And if you're not done by five minutes, you'll be able to turn on the microphone and the next person's talk. You have to sign up. So if you wanted to give a keynote about anything that should be mostly Python related, just go downstairs to the input desk. There's a flip chart. Put your name in. And it's a first-come, first-served basis, so you put your name in. You have a chance to get in. Don't miss the lightning talks for many people. That's one of the favorite parts of the conference, and very often they're very interesting because they're very short and precise. And I enjoy them very much. Postal session. So we decided this year I have a postal session, so there will be a postal session. It will be today and after noon, so after lunch there will be a postal session. And this is a chance to talk to an author. It's a bit different than a talk. A talk, you have a few question-answered talk. A poster is much more personal because usually it's just you and the author of a few people. And it's a very good chance to get deeper in the one topic and a discussion. And also, if you're a poster presenter, you will have a chance to introduce your poster very quickly with a one-sentence thing. You just say your name and the title of your poster and what's about a few seconds. And this will be right after this, in this recruiting session. So if you look in the schedule, you'll find the recruiting session. We have the recruiters in the two-sentence and you have a chance to do this. So if your poster presenter take advantage, of course this potentially attracts more people to your poster. More. So I mentioned recruitment sessions. Though I just put the three main sponsors here. We have 44 sponsors, and I didn't want the pluses to go with the sponsors. You will see they're all over the place. So thank you very much to our sponsors. They are very important for this conference. I can say this out of the sponsors, the conference wouldn't be possible as it is now. They would have been much more expensive or whatever. Or wouldn't have happened at all. So sponsors are very important. And they are a recruitment session. So if you're looking for a pysonger, that's a good chance. Or you want to know what those sponsors are doing. There will be this recruitment session in the afternoon. And they should come. And the every sponsor has a three-minute short intro with a slide or two about themselves. And then after this intro, that was just mentioned, poster introduction. Then there will be a poster session. And this poster session, the poster session will be in parallel to the recruitment session. So all the recruiters will be there with a small booth. And you can talk to them in person if you're interested. And please take advantage of this opportunity because these are companies that are interested in good pysong programs. And if you're not interested in recruitment, you can talk to the poster people. And the poster session is running longer. So you still have a chance after this recruitment session to go to the posters. Next thing, sponsor booth. There will be booth over the place. You see when you come in, in the entrance area, there's a big booth. A one-level lower. There is a nice place to sit and relax. There's a night light, a lot of nice things, and a lot of other sponsor booths. So I encourage you to go by the booths, but the sponsors, because as I said, the sponsors help us to run this conference. And you should speak to them. And they have some nice specs. They have pencils. And they have a lot of other nice gimmicks. So you might take something home for yourself or for your kids or whatever. Okay. That's the sponsor booth. There's a social event. On Wednesday night, there will be a social event. So there will be very good food. I heard they have very good food here. And also, after the social event, there will be a club downstairs. There's a club. And for people that still have energy left, they can come and join as a club. The great food, I say, that's a very nice culture program. I just put a picture of the guys that are going to run the program here. So looking forward for a very interesting program. And also, it's a very relaxed atmosphere. And pretty much everybody will be here. Also partners are invited. So there can be different, not technical conference, but relaxed. And they're still possibly as far as to buy extra tickets. So if you like to, somebody just wants to come for this event, there's still some tickets left if I'm not mistaken here. The partner program, very important. So if you didn't come alone, there's a chance if you have your partner with you or your family to explore Berlin. So it's pretty inexpensive there because it's a big package of things you can do, including a cruise with a boat here and a picnic, museums and other things. Everything packaged for the whole week, something to do. And in a group to experience Berlin. So I encourage you, if you have somebody with you who might be interested to enroll them in the program, you can still buy tickets downstairs at the infodesk. Pie ladies, lunch and barbecue. So the pie ladies are involved in the organization of the conference and the conference in general. And there's two events I would like to pinpoint here. It's a lunch on Tuesday, which is tomorrow and the barbecue on Thursday. And you need to sign up if you want to go there. So ladies, pie ladies or potential pie ladies, whoever would, are interested in this pie ladies, go there, sign up and meet like-minded people at these events. And there's some food also, good food. Sprints. So the conference is five days as we see this talks and trainings. On the weekends we have sprints. So Saturday and Sunday, please sign up. That helps us to organize things because the sprints will be catered, but we need to know how many people are there. So if you're interested either in just taking part of the program or even just on session. So if you want to have your topic covered, go to the website that will be wiki. You can put your topic in. Just register as they put your topic in and then hopefully a few people come to work with you on your topic. So join, there's quite a few topics up there already. Join this session that's up and help them develop the Python software on this two days. There's also bar camp. So if you don't like this kind of very traditional format of a conference or if in addition you like something else and they have a bar camp which is sometimes called an unconference. So it's a different type of conference. You have one hour sessions and there's no pre-planned schedule or talks or anything. People meet in the morning and they decide what they're going to talk about. That can be something like more traditional talks. That can be very open discussions. Sometimes you want to know about the topic and people teach you. So it's a very interesting format and I encourage you to go. This is bar camp. It was very interesting for me. I attended a few and all this very enjoyable. So please come. There's a bar camp. There's also a bar camp tool so you can also please sign up there so that you know that you're coming. Okay. Your Python is not alone. We have a satellite conference. It's called Pi Data. So if you're interested in Python and big data, then Pi Data is for you. It's an event running, has been running many times in North America and once in Europe in February but now it's in Berlin. So if you're interested in this very hot topic, big data and Python, go to the Pi Data. We can meet all the folks that are instrumental in this field and talk to them. It's also on the weekend, so on Saturday and Sunday. Good. That's not nearly it. I just put together a few more things. So about the name tag, I just think so if you get a name tag, they have versions with thicker paper and I heard they also have some kind of enforcement papers. Of course, it's a little bit thin. There was a small glitch when they printed it. At the back, we said already, so it's kind of double here. We're streaming. Everything will be streamed. If you're interested in things after the conference, please go to the website and look for this buckling thing that's some sort of a heads-up to organize. If you want to go to some pub and you want to meet some other Pythonistas, just go there, sign up and then the chance is higher that you meet other people that are interested in Python and just hang out in the evening somewhere. And those of you have a bunch of sponsor events, so please go to the schedule. There's a few sponsor events that you can go to. They have some very interesting things. Go there and some of them you need to sign up. Some of them you can show up, but please go there and encourage you to go there also. Okay. That's what I just said. Quick run through. And this is what I would like to do. I would like to have a nice conference and enjoyable in. Thank you. Thank you.
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Get first hand information on future research directions and learn about innovation and its transfer into industry from leading researchers at ETH Zurich. The Industry Day is an annually recurring event which showcases the research activities of ETH Zurich and offers a platform for industry to engage with ETH researchers. We aim to cover a broad range of research topics in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the activities at ETH Zurich.
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10.5446/30384 (DOI)
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Maar zoals je kunt zien heb ik overywel een dialogue over het automatos Estoype, Oparade Rodriguez, WOAD Ik wil beginnen met een spoor favouratisme van Donald Knud. Voordat ons de derivant met voorwijdel Hijė is dat van plo WE DE Het olieraftijn huidt voor basis op een groceries en door virtual transfer sondern de computeroet. En vandaag heb je gezien Aunt Ikres en je weet ook dat er veel ikres technologie in software is. We produceren in Fontmaster. En we hebben verschillende modellen. De meest belangrijkste modellen zijn de editers van de bg vormat en ikres vormat. Dit is een deel van een structuur waar ik langs vond alle deel van de productie van de productie proces en de tijddesign proces in de deel. Voor alle deel hebben we eigenlijk een model produceerd. Dit is mooi waar je deel van produceert. Je hebt een specifieke module voor dit task en niet een zware programma met alle fissionen in nette die je niet nodig hebt. Het is ook mooi voor ons om het te produceren, want als we het proberen of een bug te veranderen, moeten we alleen op dat specifieke module. Wat hier veranderen is eigenlijk een module voor tijddesign. We hebben veel batchingpower in het programma, maar op het top wil je eigenlijk beginnen met een programma dat is al een deel van de werkteleerde werkteleerde voor je. Tijddesign is een werkteleerde werkteleerde. Het is als je weet wie de designzaken zichzelf vragen. Het zou mooi zijn als er een programma was die voor je werkteleerde. Maar dan moet je eigenlijk de structuur ontdekken die eronder is. Ik ben op het moment aan het laten. Ik doe eigenlijk een phd research naar de universiteit. Er zijn twee meeste deel. Ik probeer de homo-enquijtum en modelen op de micro-niveau. En op de micro-niveau de bevrijdende beschrijvingen van deze lettermodellen. Hier op het eind, op het eind van de rechter, zie je de lettermodeller en lettermejeller die de softwaremodellen zijn. En eigenlijk is de lettermodeller op je cd en ik zal je een beetje later laten zien. Wat altijd aan het vertrekken is, is dat, voor het eerst in muziek, er is een vertrek op homo-enquijtum van Jean-Fedit Pramot, een vertrek op de 17e eeuw. Er zijn ook wel wat boeken die de hormone in Westen muziek besparen. Maar er is eigenlijk geen beschrijving van de homo-enquijtum van het lettermejeller. Dus ik dacht aan mezelf dat er een beschrijving zou zijn. En eigenlijk zou er een definitie zijn van alle systems en modelen die je in de lettermejeller vertrekt. In een traditionele manier kijken we naar de latinschip. We gebruiken variëns, kaputels, romanen, cursif's en het Gered Norsen, voor het eind van de kool, de vorms- of constructie-sorten. En eigenlijk betekent dit dat het een coherent systeem is. Dat alles die in de kaputels werkt goed samen en alle letters die er in de romanen werken goed samen, en dezelfde met de cursif. En ik heb eigenlijk nooit het idee van het. Ik zag altijd meer en elke systeem, want ik zou het zoeken dat het systeem er verschillende modellen zijn gecombineerd. Ik moet het onderleiden dat dit ook een vraag is dat er in tijd ik een lector ben in de Hege en het Royal Academy. En op een moment denk ik aan mezelf, ik ben de studenten op basis van de convention en door dit te doen, ik ben eigenlijk de conventionen op de bestemming. Dus het is eigenlijk iets dat supporten beide zaken en ik heb het niet echt... Ik heb de vraag over mijzelf gehaald, is dit correct? Dus ik kom met systeem en modellen. En wat ik probeer te zeggen is dat kaputels een harmonische systeem en romans een harmonische systeem en cursif een harmonische systeem zijn. En elke systeem is niet een coherent systeem bij definitie, maar het containt andere systeem en andere modellen. Dus waarom plaatsen we het in totaal, dit is een beetje simplifiek in het bed, maar op de top hebben je schrips, ze hebben witte systeem en witte systeem en contain alphabeten en de witte karakteren en non-letter karakteren. En een van deze kan worden geëld tussen de schrijvingsysteem. En daar kun je zien waar ik de harmonische systeem en de andere modellen plaatsen. En ik zal een brief beschrijving geven van deze systeem en modellen. Eerst van alles, ik denk dat je moet weten, is mijn opinion, dat de letters die we gebruiken, zijn in de 15e eeuw in de shape. En eigenlijk werd de invasie vervangen van de art van boekbritting. Dus, wanneer deze invasie zouden worden gemaakt, bijvoorbeeld eerder, in het 11e eeuw of even eerder in het 9e eeuw, waarschijnlijk gebruikten we verschillende letteren vandaag. Dus de ontwerpen maken het verandering op een systeem die in de 15e eeuw in de shape geeft. Als je dit verandert, dan moet je eigenlijk terug naar de basis en proberen te overleven wat er onderaan is. En dan misschien ook, en ik zal dit later opnieuw gaan, makkelijk overleven of proberen te overleven, of even proberen te bevinden met de schrijvingsysteem. Dus laten we een brief bekijken op het harmonische model. Dus als je op deze letteren kijkt, ze allemaal dezelfde constructie te bevinden en er is alleen een verschil in de weight. En deze verschil is in beide cases in de toproop en de bottomroop door verschillende effecten in de bottomroop. De broodnip heeft dezelfde width als er in de toproop in de topperroop voor de bouldersversterking. De nib was gebruikt. Dus ik heb een simpel structie gemaakt en wat simpel matten werd gevolgd en ik kwam naar dit model. En hier had ik een Johnson moment, omdat Edward Johnson in de 1920s kwam met een constructie die eigenlijk lijkt wat ik in het geometricum model heb geplaatst. Hij begon echt hoe de relatie tussen de stroken en de letters werkte. Als je met een model voor Roman en textletten komt, kan je met het deraille model voor cursies komen. Dus we hebben modelen voor de constructie van de letters en gelaten met dit, in mijn opin, een proportionele model. Dus als je op de tiep kijkt, kun je met de basis elementen spelen. Je kunt ze stretchen, maar zoals je kunt zien, als je de schepen hier stelt, dan blijft het stemwit dezelfde. Dus het is niet condensen en verwerking wat je kunt doen met letters op je computer. En als je zegt dat er een basis system is onder de neem, met fixe proportionen, dan kun je de verantwoordingen op dit systeem measures. Dus dit is van de Keren, die een Franse-Renaissance stijfes heeft gemaakt in Antwerp bij Hendrik van de Keren voor Planten, rond 1570. En dit is de Paragon-Romein, origineel. En ik ben er zeker van, het is compleet gebaseerd onder Paragon-Romein bij Caramon. Zoals je kunt zien, heb ik de model onder de neem gebruikt en eigenlijk heb ik geen veranderd van de proportionele systeem en het fitst. Dus de N-fits, de B-fits, de C-fits, dat betekent dat de rondletters en stemletters in de model fitst zoals het is. Als je dit weet, kan je het gebruiken om de typische fase te bevatten. Je kunt zien waar het eruit komt van de originele modelen. En weermaat, ik zeg dat de originele modelen in de Italian-Renaissance zijn en dan worden gebruikt door Franse puntskratters zoals Caramon. En hier heb ik gebruikt om de proportionele systeem te bevatten. Je kunt een probleem maken. Ik laat een bevrijding meesuren. Eigenlijk ben ik aan het werken waar je de modelen gebruikt om een typische fase te bevatten en om te vervangen en te vervangen eigenlijk de verschillen tussen de typische fase om het tegen de modelen te bevatten. En deze modelen kan je gebruiken van de originele modelen maar ook de proportionele veranderingen. En dat geeft je veel meer informatie dan dit. Dit is eigenlijk de klassieke manier waar we op kijken op de typische fase. En de enige dingen kun je hier inlaten. Ja, ze zijn verschillend. Ook de kleuren zijn verschillend. Maar het zegt niet van je wat je gaat zeggen over de design. Het zegt niet van je wat je gaat zeggen over de constructie en de proportionele fase. Als er een systeem is voor de constructie en de proportionele fase dan moet er een systeem waar je voor het eind van kan uitdagingen de contrast. En ik heb dit gevoel het relatieel systeem. En ik probeer niet alleen de contrast te uitdagingen maar ook de... Dit is ook de contrast. Ook hier... Hier is het verschillend dan de eerste. Hier is het brede knip tegen de exite en hier eigenlijk de zicht van de pan is gegeven. Dus hier krijg je een lage contrast. En bij het eind is het ritme systeem. Dus als je het zegt is het systeem en ik kan de constructie en de schepen uitdagingen. Ik kan ook de spasie van de letteren, in een woord, een beetje anders dan de approach dat bijvoorbeeld je de spasie van de definitie die in de karakter moet zijn plaatsen tussen de karakteren. Je kunt het refereren en je kunt zeggen, nou, als dat is gegeven als je een typefase ontdekt je moet het ontdekken in zo'n manier dat je altijd deze situatie hebt. In andere woorden bijvoorbeeld, je kunt zeggen dat er zelfs elementen dat er een typefase ontdekken. Je kunt ook zeggen dat het de ritme servietje ervoor bevindt. Dus je moet het servietje in zo'n manier dat je by definitie de ritme die in de letteren zelfs bevindt. Het is een beetje meer complex, maar dat betekent voor mij dat het niet arbitraal is, dat is eigenlijk de moeilijkste punt. De mensen kijken op een typefase en zeggen, oh, ik vind deze type een type, waarom? Of is de contrast de shape? Maar wat ben je exact aan het kijken? Dan is het even meer complex als het gaat om legabiliteit, omdat je kunt zeggen, dit is niet legabel. En de vraag is, waarom niet? En dan kan je zeggen, ja, het is niet wat ik verwacht, of de spacing is onafhankelijk. Maar het probleem met legabiliteit research, voor het eerst, is dat waar je mensen een text typefase in verschillende typefases en het is dezelfde text. De tweede keer dat ze de text de typeface leert beter, want ze weten de text. Dus bij de definitie is het makkelijk om de text te leeren en het niet te zeggen dat je de typefase is. Eigenlijk, mijn statement is dat als je de modelen hebt en de structuur, en je bedekt dat alles aan elkaar is, je moet legabiliteit researchen door de computer, door software, en niet door mensen meer. Wat is een beetje controversie, ik moet zeggen. Dus hier gebruik ik de system onder om de positie van de letters te vinden. En hier heb ik hetzelfde gedaan. Dus hier, de spacing is direct bevindigd door de system itself. Dus het is niet optisch hier. Nogtends is er niks optisch gedaan. Als je de basis van de stenen gaat, dan zijn er wat van de designen die op software kunnen worden gedaan. En er is software op de cd en ik begin het om je een impressie te geven. Dus je kunt een beetje spelen. Je kunt begonnen om een typedesigner te worden zonder meer kennis. Dat is... heel leuk. Dus hier ga ik gewoon de perimeters veranderen. En meteen de letters te veranderen. Je kunt de pen-angel veranderen. En natuurlijk, het werkt niet altijd, dus hier met de h en de n je problemen krijgt en dan kun je accepties bevinden voor de width, voor de pen-angels, etc. Dat is iets waarom als je met een broodnip gaat doen automatisch. Het is heel makkelijk te veranderen. De perimeters waar je op staat, is meer moeilijk om eigenlijk te defineren wat je doet. En mijn studie in de haak nu gebruik ik deze op de tabels als ze met een broodnip schrijven. Dus dat is een interessant verandering met een laptop in de vond van ze. Natuurlijk kun je met de s-sender en de d-sender en er zijn pre-set, pre-define sets en je kunt vooral op de sender. Als je zegt dat de sender een deel van hetzelfde systeem is als ik iets veranderd waarom de sender zal veranderen ook. Dit is iets waar we moeten werken, omdat het alleen hier voor de dejognaals werkt. Maar ook interessant kun je zien wat er gebeurt eigenlijk als je in de medevol periode ik ga dit even hier we gaan de servicijf hier weg dan ook uitgezien dat de renaillissen en alle modellen voordat ze direct connecten zijn je kunt ze eigenlijk in dezelfde model dus als je wilt speel je met de software en eigenlijk je kunt de fund genereren en openen in een van de fundmaster modellen en het is de eerste fund van een van de cases die je hebt gemaakt het is een start veel werk is al gedaan door UWW en programma het is een start maar je moet de basis constructie gaan verder ik zal deze deel voor een moment dit is meer interessant om verder te gaan en in het eind om eigenlijk ook wat je vindt mooi is ik heb een discussie met David Levin van Adobe en hij zei op een moment op een moment ik heb het niet leuk dat een computer de ontwerping voor mij doet en ik zei, waarom niet ja het is het is moeilijk maar ik wil maken dat er mooi zijn en ik zei ik heb het eigenlijk gehoord kan je wat je vindt dat er mooi is en het is op het eind waar je het kan definieren en het te schrijven we moeten ook programmen kunnen programmen en ook anders is het iets wat in de wereld is waar ik denk veel designers doen soms in de wereld maar ik wil echt op het krip en wil weten hoe het werkt en wat het is als je op de model kijkt je kunt zeggen oké maar dit is simplifijnen je maakt het in één model en dat is het en het is veel meer komplikatie een andere proog zou zijn dat je start met een scheletenlijn waar je de effect van een broadnip opgepakt is waar dit gebeurt eigenlijk in veel boeken je gaat leiden wat gebeurt waar je een broadnip en eigenlijk de schapen van de letteren van de broadnips zijn de resultaten van een certaine schap waarin de effect van de broadnip is gegeven en ik denk dat dit helemaal niet correct en ik heb hier meer of minder een arbitrair scheletenlijn zoals je kunt zien op de deur en dan heb ik een broadnip met een aantal van 15 en 30 graden op het en in beide cases het resultaat is niet perfect met 30 graden het is veel meer in de directie dat je verwacht dus de connectie van de arch en de stem is veel meer wat we gebruiken om te zien in andere woorden je kunt een arbitrair maken of het niet helemaal arbitrair natuurlijk maar je kunt een scheletenlijn maken en dan de effect van een broadnip dus laten we eens kijken dus dit is de effect met 30 graden op de deur op de deur en als je op de scheletenlijn kijkt het verschilt en eigenlijk dit explicaat wat er gebeurt in de historie de woorden die we nu gebruiken zijn based op modders die hebben met een broadnip en het voelden hun constructie in de broadnip het is niet iets dat is geopeld omdat ze niet reisden deze woorden met een marker en dan de effect van de broadnip op deze schijven dit is de effect de bridge en om dit te simpliferen de effect de bridge moet in de richting van de broadnip angle dus je moet een lijn hebben dat in de richting van de angle je gebruikt je vindt ook de vwx yz in de software en speciaal als je wat extreme parameters hebt je ziet wat stil en dan zou je zeggen de model niet werken maar eigenlijk de model werkt en het ontdekent wat ik earlier zei het is niet een coherent system die we gebruiken het is een collectie van schijven en we willen het zien als een coherent system maar eigenlijk is het niet het is goed het werkt voor ons maar het is van perfect de letternauwe dus misschien moet je een verschillende approach hebben en als je op de historie kijkt kun je zien dat de k en de v en de w en de y en de z zijn er ook van of eigenlijk van de kapitels origineel de romantie kapitels en ze vonden origineel in de grieken kapitels en de grieken kapitels waren eigenlijk in schelding ligt dus wat werkt niet voor de meeste letteren in de model hebben we gevoel werkt eigenlijk voor de kapitels omdat de romantie de systeem van de Grieken verwerkt en de simpel geometricke schepen de Grieken we gebruiken dan is het geen probleem om de broodnip te verwerken dus je kunt een broodnip verwerken om de schepen en wat we nu werken is voor voor de kapitels er zal zijn schettinglijden schepen in de letter modeler waarom je dezelfde effecten kan verwerken dat je selecteerd voor de harmonische model van de tekstnet dus als je een paar parameteren verwerkt die op de kapitels en waarschijnlijk geen probleem en deze schepen je kunt modificeren hoeveel je wilt tot ze de romantie verwerken dus het is gewoon een collectie van schettinglijden en natuurlijk als het voor de kapitels werkt dat ook voor de letteren die de kapitels verwerken die zijn kdx de vwx yz en in mijn opinie ook de s maar ik weet niet dat helemaal natuurlijk als je iets van zoals dit werkt mensen zeggen het is iets waarvoor mensen zoals Durer werd Durer werd in de in de 16. en 15e eeuw ook veel hoteljers werken op dit maar het is niet dit is eigenlijk de schepen van de buitenkant je hebt een schep die is verkeerd en dan probeer je met een ruler en een compass iets van laagwiliteit ik heb het gezegd en dat laagwiliteit een complexe ding en dit is wat Gerrit Unger schrijft in zijn boek op leiding het probleem met laagwiliteit is dat als designer te veranderen de letterform dat is de enige ding die je kunt gewoon doen is te experimenteren met de schepen het is niet een mooi idee eigenlijk dus je kunt het spelen je kunt het veranderen en dan het zou beter zijn maar kijk naar dit er zijn veel discussies over wat beter te voelen een sensor of een servo en de meest gebruikte explicatie is dat de topletter beter te voelen omdat van de servo ja, waarom? het geeft je een beter base en het maakt het meer compact dus het werkt beter op de onderdeel je krijgt de sensor verandering en hier is de spasen identieer dus de spas in de letter is geplaatst tussen de letter zoals je hier kunt zien de enige ding is dat op de onderdeel de ritme is veranderd dus als ik de steminterfool introducteer je kunt zien dat de steminterfool in de servo is bijna identieer binnen de M als tussen de M en de I en in de sensor waar je de spas binnen de letter moet worden geplaatst tussen de letter het is mogelijk om dezelfe spas in te blijven dus voor mij is dit een beter explicatie waar het niet werkt omdat het systeem in de 15e eeuw was het was gemaakt met een hoge verandering het was gemaakt met servo en als je verandering op het moment je ziet dat het niet werkt meer omdat het werkt maar misschien minder dan de origineel omdat je iets wat nooit gebeurd is in de mind van bijvoorbeeld griffel of later caramon en als we over muziek praten ik wil ook over muziek en om dit te verbinden en voor�en in muziek je moet de kantosvermoes ik zou zeggen dat de serven de scriptosvermoes zijn en eigenlijk alle informatie van de typefaces in de serven ik zou zo ver gaan als ik zeggen dat de DNA van de typefaces in de serven als je een serven hebt kun je de typefaces verbinden het is zoals heerlijke park we vinden een serf van een oude typefaces en we verbinden het en ik denk dat je het kunt eigenlijk omdat in de serven je de kantosvermoes de kantosvermoes de weight en met dezelfde modellen die ik showed vóór je kunt de shape van de serven de weight de kantosvermoes te verbinden meer of de typefaces een ander, de kantosvermoes ik denk dat met de vermoes de muziek je ook had een vermoes van de kantosvermoes in letteren het eigenlijk verhaalde in dezelfde periode hier kun je zien Bach en David Koop en in automatie eigenlijk de design type design de part is niet dan op een grote skill in de typeworld in de muziekworld de automatie is meer voorzitterig en een van de projecten is de EMI project door David Koop waar hij eigenlijk ontwikkeld een systeem of een computer programma die analyse er existent muziek en verbilte nieuwe muziek in dezelfde stijl dus het analyse de stijl en de structuur van de originele composer en generatie nieuwe muziek en hij is referent een game die was played in de eindigde eeuw de muziekkardische wereldspeel je hebt het al gezien van de muziekardische wereldspeel je speelt deze dagelijks dat er is wat informatie op in de kleine booklet die ik ook op je desk het was een diesgamer en eigenlijk was het met predefined bars en wat de combinatie van de bars was uiteindelijk had je een nieuwe compositor en Koop gebruikt deze en eigenlijk Mozart en Haydn we doen het en mensen denken dat Mozart het systeem inventoet maar dat is eigenlijk het juiste hij speelt de game ook maar dat is niet zijn inventie Koop gebruikt deze dit is alle muziekardische wereldspeel hier zijn de bars gebruikt en altijd de resultaat is een nieuwe muziek en Koop is referent op deze dus hij analiseert muziek hij maakt, constructeert nieuwe bars en deze bars zijn in een verschillende systeem geplaatst een nieuwe stuk muziek en ook in de muziek wereld wat hij doet is voorzichtig want mensen willen het mensen willen het idee dat composing of ontwerp type iets dat kan worden gedaan automatisch het is een deel van de deel van de mensmijnen en we willen niet zien of dat computers deze werk kunnen doen soms zei de mensmijnen het is leuk als computers de werken doen, we hebben meer tijd om uit te drinken en op hetzelfde de basis kan worden gedaan door computers en uiteindelijk kan u het tweaken en het veranderen en vertel niemand dat de computer het meest voor je deed en nog steeds dezelfde prijs als je vond en drink meer beer, etc. 3 het is een mooie idee oké laten we het even blijven ik heb het model hier ik heb het gegeven en hier ben ik de volgende stap hier ga ik de stof polisheren en ook dit kun je hier door computers doen dit is meer of meer dit zijn meer of meer de proportionen die Sean Song gebruikt in de Eusebius en je kunt zien dat de b en de e zijn redelijk wide en hier de bar van de e wordt horizontal die was de volgende stap eigenlijk in de vervolking en hier kun je wat kondenseren en dit is eigenlijk wat je kunt zien in de werk van Griffo dit is op het eind van de 50e ee bijvoorbeeld in de hypnorotomagia polyfilie van 1499 dus dit is de historie van de tijd vervolking in een nutshell en wat er hier gebeurt is dat de belg van de a wordt groter en ook de toppenstap van de e ik denk dat dit er veel tijd voor om de computer te doen maar dit is mogelijk om de refijmement te vervolgen eigenlijk als je het kan bevind en je kan het programmen meer of meer dus hier weer de verandering van de Sean Song en hier kun je de originale dit is Griffo en als je de proportionen van de b en de b en de q kun je dat zien waar je naar de eerste stap is te maken om deze meer te vervolgen en dit model was gebruikt door Garamon in de 16e eeuw in de Garamon model is en is de basis voor een veel type fase dus wat je kunt zien hier is dat er een verandering van de proportionele systeem en hier kun je ook deze en eigenlijk het write-down en de uitkomst en kijken wat de dissoces zijn er is ook de verandering van de o die niet meer iets te doen met een verandering van NIP maar het is gewoon een verandering van de counter als je de o of de b of de b de counter de counter-axis zal eigenlijk meer verandering zijn dus een beetje knoed hier de meeste van je weet of je het met metafoon of natuurlijk maak je een systeem waar je parameteriseert ook de letteren maar dit is meer wat Durer deed dit is beschrijven van de buitenkant je moet een schep een certaine design je schrijft het en dan je hebt de opzicht om de parameteris te veranderen dus ik denk dat dit een heel verschillende verandering is en een andere persoon die er was een image van dit weet je de font-comedian die was een programma meer dan een dekend en je kunt een veel verandering eigenlijk door interpolatie was een externe basis van de schepen die je kunt interpoleren en dat heeft niets te doen met mijn systeem want er is geen interpolatie het is gewoon based op een singel schepen van schepen hier kun je ook wat andere steppen in beschrijving en refining schepen en ook wat gebeurt dan als een breed schep van de O wordt zoals dit je kunt dit voor alle details doen en u heeft eindelijk indruk van alle details om te refineren en speciaal te defineren en dit is de moeilijkste en eigenlijk alle designers moeten kunnen doen dit omdat hij zijn eigen en beschrijving zijn eigen parametre hij gebruikt je kunt zien steppen waar de oren van de pan wordt gegeven en hier is de contrast en hier ga je van hoog naar Egyptie en naast de volgende stap zal er een sensor zijn een ikriske image want ik ga over wat een servo is is het een triangle die uitstekt of een shape dat relateer is door het triangle of dus een sensor ook een servo en hier is een interpelatie gemaakt tussen Argo en Argo en de details van de vleesman die resultaten in details van de vlees ik ben de enige user dus het is niet voor de zaken maar je kunt vragen of een sensor heeft zelfs dan er niets te interpelaken er is zeker iets te interpelaken hier dus eigenlijk een sensor heeft zelfs ook de moeilijkste deel is idiom om idiom te beschrijven als je muziek luistert en je zegt dat is bug of dat is handel omdat je de idiom wel kreeg maar ook omdat je de parts wel kreeg omdat hij de bug heeft gebruikt voor een handel of een verandering ze hebben dezelfde parts gebruikt in andere stukken eigenlijk is idiom voor een groot deel opgever jezelf opgever hetzelfde trick, ook in het geval wat je ook opgever opgever hij doet dezelfde hij handelt de details in dezelfde manier in zijn verschillende vorm inderdaad van de contrast of de contrastsord als je een computer wilt te ontdekken voor je op de eind zou je deze ook volledig doen, ook de idiom dus dat betekent dat je moet beschrijven de idiom van je eigen werk en je kunt begrijpen voor instance, te beschrijven wat is hij hoe is hij verkeerd en verkeerd dus hij heeft drie a's en de red die muziek wat van de krimpen normaal doet met de bel van de a hij heeft zijn pen opgever geïnteresseerd in de vorm en je zal dit bekijken in al zijn type in de horeld, in het spectrum zelfs in Romulus je zal wat van deze effecten zien dat me echt enthousiast hoe kan je indrukken en hoe kan je het bevinden dus je moet in mijn opinie een simpel basis modelen en dan op de einde waar je alle details te beschrijven maar dat is moeilijk en eigenlijk wat David Kope doet met EMI is regeen de idiom, hij regeert de deken die zijn heel karakteristisch voor een bepaalde composer en met regeen en de bar in andere sequensen hij maakt nieuwe composities in de stijl van deze compozen maar dit ik denk dat we en ik op de UWM zelf werken voor 20 jaar om de simpel refineren te maken en dan zal het nog langer te beschrijven, de idiom dat zal de moeilijkste deze zijn hopelijk als ik hier ben op de konferentie de 20e in 40 jaar iets zoals dit, ik hoop dat je dat werkt met de idiom ook, dus je krijgt de nieuwe versie van de lettermodeller en er zijn ook meer parameters en je kunt zeggen, ik wil de type in de stijl van Herman Sopf of Frank Krimpen of Gadamal of wat je heren zijn, we zullen het in en je krijgt je parameters eigenlijk, ik denk dat het mogelijk is dit is niet echt mijn departement dit is Hangul en dit is Kansi wanneer ik samen met Chris Brandt op Albertina hadden we een Cyrillic en een Grieken versie 2 en hij maakte droogheden in de 1950s en de 1964 Albertina en die kan in Grieken versie en zijn opvinding was dat wanneer je Laten begint en je Blik en White begint je kunt je letters voor iedere scripten geen wicht je kunt dit doen, zolang je ze niet laten zien aan andere mensen dan is het oké maar anders is het niet erg en om eigenlijk te onderleiden dat ons systeem werkt voor ons en wat we het noemen voor legebiliteer wat is legebal voor ons dat betekent niet dat het legebal voor andere scripts of dat je dezelfde parameters voor deze andere scripts wat ook op de lijn dat de letters we gebruiken is niet een systeem het is geëld in een bepaald het is verkeerd in de 15e eeuw door de inventie van behoorlijk vormige type, de art van boekprinting maar is niet beter of weer dan andere systeem wat we bedoelen is het meestal in mijn opin de effect van de resultat de bestemming je hebt al leerd om deze letters te leiden en als je leerd Hangul of kanji of wat op school zou je deze letters meer legebal zijn dan letter dus dat maakt het ook meer complex voor mij als legebouw en ook als het op legebiliteer gaat en je kunt zeggen de tijd is meer legebal dan garamon of andere type het is alstubel meer legebal dan komixant geen dubbel maar als de tijdfazer dichter er zijn veel effecten en ik denk dat in de meeste cases niet de tijdfazer is bepaald maar de typografie dus de typografie is lauw de legebiliteer zal ook niet zijn oké dus je hebt niet de tijdfazer maar de typografie maar de tijdfazer als je dat uitgaat je kunt zeggen dat de beste typografie is besteld door de tijdfazer dus in de schapen van de tijdfazer de proportionele systemen, de harmonische systemen de typografie is besteld en het moet eigenlijk door de computer helemaal op basis van de modellen dus geen interfacie door de mens nodig omdat in de system zelf en andersom, als je niet met mij gelooft je zegt dat er veel arbitrair effecten zijn gevolgd dus in 25, 35 jaar we kunnen stoppen tijdfazering omdat het door computers wordt gedaan de boeken worden gemaakt, de typografie wordt door computers gedaan en we hebben geen verkeer om legebiliteer te hebben omdat legebiliteer wordt door computers gepast dus we kunnen uitdelen en drinken, weer een beer en bekijk de resultaten zoals ik zei, is het een beetje controversie wat meestal is dat ik het gewoon het lijkt op, ik het gewoon in de modellen dus je kunt zeggen, wat ik doe is veel meer complex dan wat je zei met de modellen en de modellen werken niet omdat ze niet voor alle letters in het alphabet werken de modellen zeggen dat het niet een cogeerend system is en door de definitie als er een boodnip weet, je moet de VWXYZ laten werken in een propere manier met de andere letter en als je de typografie aan het ontdek weet je ook dat als het door deze letters in de rest van het alphabet altijd heel complex dus ze zien gewoon bij de oude dag maar er zijn altijd een complexe facteur als je het aan het ontdek eigenlijk dat concloedt mijn opzicht op het harmonische systeem weer terug naar het punt dat we de raken opgepast willen om de andere schip te in dit geval het is helemaal anders het systeem is anders alle ideeën over rym en color kunnen niet in dit systeem dus je moet niet proberen te veranderen en dat betekent dat onze raken de meest culturele de basis je bent wel enthousiast k сложно nu hem ook hij heeft misschien bouwen dan dan espelen ze dat is leuk dan het diagnostic de b bezandom secaccepte nine man eng toxel Het is moeilijk te compareren natuurlijk. Een andere vraag? Ik heb een relatie. Ik heb jouw muziek parallel. Ik heb een software over het analyseren die het nummer 1 opgezet heeft. En het behoefteert het voor de recurring pattern. En daarom hebben we een versprekterde beschrijving opgezet om nummer 1 te maken. Dus, doe je je parallel daar? In analyseren, ja, omdat dat het veel te lijkt wat EMI is doen van David Koop voor de jaren al. Analyzing muziek en als je wat kan analyseren wat er succes krijgt. Ik denk dat je het ook kunt doen, door het te copyeren van dingen die succes zijn. Niet alleen met WIJ, maar ook in de muziekindustrie. Het klinkt veel, maar wat heeft Koop het doen? Dat is een soort van hielende. Je kunt de vraag kunnen stellen of het een mooie idee is. Ik wens niet, want ik wil weten, als de uitkomst is dat, voor het eerst, iemand me vraagt, wat is het betreft dat de typedesign niet art is. Ik zei, als het de uitkomst is, ik zal het wel accepten, want ik wil niet me voelen. Ik wil weten en ik wil niet me voelen, ook. Ik wil echt geloven wat ik zei, en niet om ze in een manier te konditioneren. Ik was lang geleden aan het academy gegeven. Als het uitkomst is dat het minder interessant is dan art of grootmanschap, dan zal ik iets anders doen, zoals een koekschool of iets. Je moet niet bang zijn om deze vraag te vragen. Maar ook met idiom, op een moment wordt het idiom dezelfde truc weer en weer, en dan wordt het een truc met veel risie en niet de kwaliteit. Dat is vergelaten. Waarom zijn de typedesign meer succesvol dan andere? Ik denk dat, op de definitie, als de typedesignen op historische modellen zijn die de standaard zijn, ze hebben meer kansen om succesvol te worden. Dus op de proportionen en de modellen van Kouden-Molv, vooral. En dan, natuurlijk, je hebt typedesignen die een hittere, meer succesvol zijn voor een bepaald tijd, omdat ze vergelijken met de popcoach of wat. Ik denk dat als je kijkt naar de typedesignen die op het eind van de 1980's waren, de kwaliteit was heel hoog. Dat was een van de redenen voor mij om de DTL te starten. En de kwaliteit was hoog omdat er zo veel zelfproclaimte typeprocrafers waren, omdat alle mensen die een Mac hebben, en eerst in de haal hadden we 20 typeprocrafers, zelfs minder, en dan hadden we een paar miljoen. En deze mensen waren onintekend. En als je typefaces produceert, die dezelfde niveau hebben, in dit geval het voelt een beetje negatief, maar de niveau van je audience, ze kennen deze kwaliteit. Mijn idee was altijd dat in de tijd die kwaliteit was gegrasd dat de procrafers op de computer beter werden, en dat ze die typefaces met een hoge kwaliteit willen, omdat dat de volgende niveau is. En voor DTL werkt het heel goed uit. Ik weet niet of ik helemaal was, maar het werkt de idee. Dus het bedoelt ook op de markt dat je wilt aanbrengen. Dat is natuurlijk een heel belangrijk factorie. En we zijn met die typefaces op de hoogte van de markt, maar het is nog een markt, de typefaces die minder verkeerd zijn, omdat veel mensen niet willen verkeerd zijn dat we het overal of niet zien. Of we zijn te verkeerd, die ook een factie zou zijn. Ja, oké, dan wil ik hiernaast concludeeren.
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Not only font production processes can be automated (with DTL FontMaster); to a certain extend also the type design process can be done by software itself. Blokland will give an introduction on the (possible) automation of type design processes and a presentation of the most recent version of the DTL LetterModeller application.
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10.5446/21969 (DOI)
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So good morning. I want to talk about what digital means when somebody is saying digital typography and where artificial intelligence is involved. You will see. So I divided into typefaces and text, digital typography. So what means digital typeface? So what digital? Like Peter was presenting it. So it started with the manufacturing of typefaces for photo typesetters in 72. Our desktop at that time. Quite nice. Our PC at that time. As Peter said, a large disk having 5 megabytes and with that computer I had about 20 kilobytes free for putting in the program. So you made overlapping and things like that. Nice. My first brochure, I presented it in 75. All designers were shouting with me and saying, oh, you are not a good designer. And all for design. And I was very proud of it. I'm a physicist. I thought it's looking quite good. Nobody liked it. So digital in connection with typefaces means that you have formats, variations, interpolation, resur rising, hinting, auto tracing, gray scaling and element separation. I just will mention it and show you a picture to remember. So I just, for me, it's not just a format which is digital. So as Peter mentioned, we had a sort of beginning. So some enlarged characters, maybe hand drawn. And we had to produce in the beginning, more or less, simple formats like bitmaps or run links codes or vector formats. Scan graphic had a vector format. Post clip later on. Very early. Philip Quinn Ewell invented element, element separation. Meta font, Donald Noose. He visited us. I was very proud of it. Okay. Digital is especially a typeface when it is produced by a computer. So many variants, variations could be digitally produced. Okay. You know, you can continue enlarge fonts or reduce contouring. It's a digital process. The real tele-sizing, expanding condensing with keeping stem widths, rounding, shadowing, antiquing. So we started with contouring and shadowing. From the beginning on, people around me, they wanted to have, especially contouring and shadowing to save some hand work. Yeah. It's more or less, I thought everybody would like it, but not so many people. Or here. You know, you can take antiquing and then you put on the parameters so that you get an ice-aged font. Also, nobody likes it. Interpolation. You know, in the beginning, I was asked to digitize a normal font and then to produce a family automatically. I tried very often. Remember, Igor was in crash. And my partner, Rubel, at that time, then said, no, don't try it anymore. It took you already a year or maybe a little more. Start with two fonts with a thinner one and then interpolate it. Young Millrod program, then that also you could interpolate between Antica and Autesque font. Again, when we were very proud and there wasn't a lot of work, nobody likes it. Restorizing a font could be hard. If you don't have some help, then you have the accidents. And I think you can easily imagine that this is not what you would like to have as an age or whatever corner. You have the hierarchy. When the EM just consists of 6x6 pixels, then you have no big choice. You only can produce, let me say, one font. This up there, one. That is a character S. You can try and try and try, but there is only one S as far as I know it. Very early, we invented auto-hinting. We started with a few hints. It ended up with some more hints. You have to find them automatically. So, involved is artificial intelligence. The same is always auto-tracing. So, you have to, for example, distinguish between a sharp corner and a round corner. For us human beings, having our brain, it is usually very simple. This corner is round or sharp. For a computer, having just as input a scan font, it is hard. So, again, we worked quite a while on it. I don't know, maybe 5 years or something like that. Grayscaling. When I started with grayscaling, people were around teaching me that the left side, bitmap image, is better than the right side. For example, Macintosh, they were used to that kind of bitmap fonts. In the beginning, they didn't like the grayscaling. Even here, we can easily see that the left side is hard to be read. They liked it. I wanted to teach them, oh, look, you have to make grayscaling, talking with Microsoft or Adobe. They said, no, the left side is better. Even showing them this picture, they said, yes, the left side is better. It took a while. Sometimes it is astonishing. Here, in connection with the company of Fuyitsu, we had a big project, especially Jürgen Wilrod had to invent a lot of little things to do element separation. To take a kanji character and separate it into some elements, here, and then into strokes and then into the parts of strokes. The reason was to reduce the needed headwork to save money, if you like, to avoid the effects of handwriting. When you go through that, what you can achieve, the needed memory is set up by the data for administration, not that much for the image information. Involved again, there is artificial intelligence. So far, what I think digital means in connection with typefaces. Now, digital text composition. I guess everybody is familiar to context-based character choice. HG means Herman Saff. We worked again a few years to get along with automatic kerning, Peter mentioned it. As a physicist, I applied some theories. So, theoretically, I thought in between two characters, there is a certain power which attracts the characters, but the nearer they come, the more repulsive power would be there. At the end, we just had to put in a lot of empirical adjustments. So, we couldn't program a theory, a lot of headwork, as a programmer. But the results were convincing. So, we had, especially in sign business success, that's kerning. Now, optical scaling. Not many people are using it. I automated it. I just show you sort of rule. It is for text fonts, you have the one direction and for both ones, it's just reversed. Together with Herman Saff, we worked on paragraph composition. We called it HG program. It is put into InDesign, so one of the Adobe programs. It just said, they didn't like to call this part HG, and still up to today, I have not understood why. Because for me, to call it HG program was not just natural, but also would be a good advertising for it. What it is able to do is obvious. So, on the left side, you see the result, and on the right side. So, whenever I, as you can see, here the paragraph is ending with just one line and one word, and the next paragraph inside has some holes in it. So, also here, it's a magazine composition. So, of course, you have very narrow column. I guess it's obvious. Based on the HG program, which handles in the sequence the paragraph and under the paragraphs the lines within the line, the words, within the words, the characters. So, what I started with is chapter composition in the same way. It's just that you have a chapter, and beyond the chapter, the pages, and beyond the pages, the paragraphs. So, I invented, if you like, paragraph hyphenation. So, you rearrange the paragraph in a way that every paragraph, when it is the last one, ends with a sign, for example, full stop, on that page. And the next page starts with the beginning of a sentence. Paragraph fit does mean that you don't allow paragraphs ending with lines which are too short or too long in gray here. I marked the zone which you should allow just for ending a line as the last line of a paragraph. Nobody does it automatically. It's there. I don't know. Maybe people don't like it, but I don't like the left side. Again, the reason for inventing chapter fit was that, for example, you can have, you want to have four pages. You know that the chapter starts at the end, and it ends on the left side. So, here, it's just what you have to do, and I marked it with some words on the margin. And then, when the chapter fit has done its job, then you have just four pages, and all paragraphs are ending in the right way, and you have paragraph hyphenation and things like that. So, here, nobody is using it. Digital edge, again, is where I think the word digital is correct. So, think of the various edge we can have. And we started to structure the edge to invent a certain, or to employ a certain hierarchy. You start with a sort of template, a sort of master, then you put in that what you want to have, and then the edge is rearranged automatically in the typographic correct way. And I guess everybody is seeing it, so... And I want to stop. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Dr. Gau, you worked at Adobe for some time, and you showed the kerning that you developed was put in Adobe InDesign, for instance. But also the chapter fit stuff, what you just showed, is built in InDesign. No. Not exactly. But they used your ideas for this. Because everything you are showing, you are probably familiar with the way you can do it in InDesign, fitting your paragraphs and so on. Which is basically the technology which is described here. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with it. But you worked from when to when at Adobe? As long as I was involved, I just put all this, what we had. We brought without the program, the chapter fit, and I wrote for them the application for a patent. And of course I was working as an evangelist, so I was talking about quite a lot, but I thought they were not listening. They did, actually. Okay, great. Nobody told me. This is the way it goes quite often with technology. It's invented by some people, to say bluntly used by the large companies. Are you sure? Chapter fit? I mean, working... Paragraph fitting. Not paragraphs. Paragraph. Okay. Paragraph, that is the edgy program. That's part of the design. No, you said chapter fit. Ah, sorry. Chapter fit is just, they put it into some table or so. So I said nasty things about the big company. It is a sleeping paddle. Okay. Any other questions? The ideas you said most of these are not being used, is it? Perhaps because they're the commercial type setting programs. It's difficult to implement that. For example, you had the zone where the paragraph ends. You didn't want to turn into the beginning or the end, near the margin. It's generally difficult to automate that in page-maker programs. I'm afraid I have not really understood. It's just, what I was talking about is automation and the user is not caring about it. He gets it. No? But it was not a question actually. What I'm saying is it is difficult to, the idea is good, but it's difficult to implement it. So it's, is it basically too complex to implement it in the software? Is that one of the reasons that for instance the chapter fit stuff has not been used so far? So, no, I don't think so. I guess nobody's asking for it. Consequences are too big. The space between the words will be, just there is the problem. It's also a problem also already with paragraph fitting. Sometimes the consequences are too big. So paragraph fitting and for page fitting, the consequences will be even bigger. And there starts the problem. I thought it just the other way. For the whole picture. I thought when you apply it, it's much easier and better to read. So, I mean, it's not. I don't agree. Yeah. Hi, Bart. So if you say, no, I don't want different sized characters. I don't want the line of 7 half points next to the line of 7.75 points next to the line of 7.3 points. Because it might be irregular. Maybe you just will not see it. So, I mean, paragraph fitting finds it hard to live with when sizes are scaled, type sizes are being scaled differently to achieve perfect technicality. And that comes to the letter fits and to the word spaces. So, I have just that paragraph that I give very much of what I think is important. The word spacing, character spacing, and the type size to get back the result, which is maybe less, from my point, less important than what we don't have. It's a matter of balance. What is more important when I say that paragraph fit is the most important thing? I give you too much of my ideas of how this text is going to be. Especially here, this is a result of the HG program. And when discussing it with people, there are many teaching me that the right side is better. So, when I point to the rivers and creeks, then they say, OK, sometimes I'm hearing, I heard that they like it. I can't help. Of course, when you apply the HG program, you have to expand or condense the characters a little bit to achieve the aim, but at the end, at least optically, the result of the HG program is at least optically convincing. But nevertheless, there are people liking the right side as a result. I don't think that it's sort of a smooth approach. I think you're right that in general, that side here is better than the right side. I would also agree that the point is that you never did a perfect work. And that's the result on the left. You don't get that quality result any time. So, there will also be mistakes in the version on the left. The big problem for people like me is that we get confronted with many, many, many results from the left. And we are not able to, as a type of worker, we are not able to check what happened because it affects too much. Some of these things we can reduce, like automatic hyphenation. Before 20 years, automatic hyphenation, many typesetters would say, don't tell me about automatic hyphenation. Because it makes so many mistakes. And I always get the checkers the horrible stuff. So, we better, it prefers to do it by hand. People that do it by hand switch off the automatic hyphenation before. Because they didn't like the way the program works. And they felt it was much easier to do it by hand. They said, well, this line is finished. That's the end. I'm not going to go back in this line again. So, they want to finish my work. So, what happens is that you put all the lines in the automatic hyphenation. It's the type that will go like this. So, 58 mistakes in the start. And I have checked it and I have to go through it again. Otherwise, it will go from there. So, you take the packages and you also consider, well, I'm going to change the lines for the next year. Then work starts. So, at some point I agree that we can live with these things. Because nowadays, we would also let them do automatic hyphenation. Let them also look back in the previous line. Like, in the chapter with their ideas of look. That you don't look ahead. You also look back. Then you get better results in your life. So, in the end, in any case, anything separate. But when you also change the character width, also it changes the character size, it also changes the character, the workspace, to a large extent. Then I think there is somewhere there will be a level in this user's aspect. Because it is getting too much. That's why it's... Yeah, but therefore you're a typographer at the end. So, that's your function. And actually, that's being said recently. I spoke to Gerrit Nordze. You know, he's critical. And he said, the paragraph fitting in InDesign is so good. I can't do it better myself by hand. He uses it for all his publications. So... Out of the readability, there is another thing. The left column is two lines shorter. The right one. So, there is an economic aspect there too. When you have a book of 200 pages, it can change your thickness of the book by several pages. Less paper. Less weight. Same price. Yeah, but maybe you don't like it when you are paid per line. No, but at the end, I think it's marvelous the technology that we can use today. And therefore you are a professional to look at the outcome and see where you want to correct it if necessary. But basically, I think it's a splendid technology person. But you see there is still some discussion about it. As you said, not everybody likes it. No, it's retro. Frank, we might see this technology in the future. It might be ideally suited for electronic books. You have to zoom in and re-lay out the page every time. Absolutely. I think so too. Are there any other questions? There was one there. I was wondering about this project you mentioned, which is the decomposed character. And I wondered if you could tell us more about its history and how and when it was implemented, if it's still in use, if it was successful. Was successful? It was a project which was developed for printout. And at that time, the space was considered an important point. But I think they built one printer based on this technology. When it turned out that the production of the fonts was quite tedious. It took a long time. And for us, I think the technology in printing is no longer in use. But separated kanji fonts and compressed kanji fonts based on elements, separation, or spoke separation are still very popular for small devices like cell phones, mobile phones, head movements in cars, or something like that. So there's still a demand for compressed small kanji fonts which are based on different ways to separate the elements. These are always custom-made, special things. These are not industry standards. There's no standard for separation. There are several methods to do that. Some are based on true type, some are based on true type printing. Some are based on proprietary solutions. So several companies are offering these kinds of fonts and associated technologies. But there's no kind of open standard on that. I may be just to be an idea, but not on the use of Japanese fonts but also on the comments. Because it's a similar thing, where you can separate the arabic strokes or separate kanji strokes. There will be quite a few. Is there a lot of overlap? No, there is a similarity. But as far as I've studied it, we found constant shapes in Arabic when decomposing it. We don't need to do any additional unequal scaling. The way I understand Chinese, it is basically a three-by-three grid where a basic complement of primitives, the smallest set is about three dozen, and then there is a minimal set of 200, some 200 characters that have to be positioned into this grid. Graphimically, it's very... Graphimes are abstractions. This is what you understand as information from a shape. Graphimically, it's all very simple. But graphically, the actual shaping is very complex because they have to be fit into the grid. And sometimes the same graphene, the same base element, has to be spread over three boxes, sometimes over two boxes, some only one, some sometimes have to go horizontally. And the basic thing is I don't touch it because I don't understand it. Could you note the CD? Yeah, do you want something else from the CD? No, it's just that... You want to have it? Yeah. Okay. So, and where do you want to have it? One more question? Yes, of course. Yeah. This HSS program is a chapter piece. Can you explain, anyway, how this works? Does it work with penalties? Yeah. It has several options. How does this work? Yes. Basically, it should work automatically, completely, automatically. So, it should... But in the same way as the AG program is working, the same philosophy. So, the parameters are line widths, but also the column widths. So, quite a range of parameters. But how does the program make decisions on what is it based on? I haven't got it. Sorry. If you have one paragraph, it can be said in many different ways. Wait, you started with chapter, and now you are talking about the paragraph. Yeah, I mean paragraph. So, okay, paragraph. In the paragraph, you have several options. Yeah. And how... What is the base, like, which option comes out? How does this work? There's a two-second problem. Are you probably wanting to know what the options are? What happens? What happens in your skills? What's the name? Sorry. So, basically, you calculate all possible variations. Then, and for every variation, you calculate the kind of deviation of the idea, and this is the penalty. And you take that variation, which got the smallest penalty. I mean, I would like to explain it, but that takes quite a long. Oh, yes, I'm done. Okay, okay. I brought with me a paper, so a normal Word document. In there, I wrote down a little bit how it works, if you like, to get that paper. Frank will have it, so this document also could be, I guess, could be sent by him to everybody who likes to have it. Just ask him. No, no, I will send it to everybody. It's a small document. Yeah, it's about 30 pages or something like that. Small document. But, you know, there is just a corner where it's written, HG program, and then you will find very easily the text in which I explain it. I'm sorry. There are all the questions.
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Digital Typography transpired in type design and text layout. It has changed font production and text composition in their entirety. Dr. Karow was involved in many of the demands for digital typefaces which came into existence from 1972 through 1997. These issues included formats, variations, interpolation, rasterizing, hinting, autotracing, grayscaling, and element separation. Modern text composition was mostly influenced by programs such as WordStar, Word, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and FrameMaker, which replaced writing, typesetting and printing in offices on the one hand and at home on the other. In current times, text is composed much less manually than in the past, but not as digitally generated as its potential. Within modern text composition, digital text is a special part that should proceed without manual assistance and human layout. Up to now, the milestones were these: kerning, optical scaling, paragraph composition (hz-program), chapter composition (chapter fit), and digital ads. As is known, a good deal of engineering endeavors has already been implemented in regards to digital typography. However, distinct challenges still exist such as refinements to autotracing, autohinting, element separation, kerning, optical scaling, chapter fit, and automatic text composition. Many sophisticated tasks are still left to be executed, they belong more to artificial intelligence than to engineering.
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10.5446/21811 (DOI)
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Es wird gesprochen von einem digitalen Delirium und der Mann, der jetzt hier gerade schon seinen Laptop vorbereitet, ist Nishansha. Er arbeitet an der Bangalore Center for Internet and Society, hat auch dort seine Doktorarbeit geschrieben. Und ich bin sehr, sehr, sehr gespannt, weil der Vortrag, der wird jetzt glaube ich etwas länger, nicht eine halbe, sondern eine Dreiviertelstunde bis eine Stunde. Danach wird es noch die Möglichkeiten, selbstverständlich geben, Fragen zu stellen. Und geht's? Und deswegen Applaus, Nishansha, bitte schön. Ich bin hier zu präsentieren, etwas, was Digitalnatives mit der Kurs zu tun ist. Es gibt einen Fragenmark, der ich mir gedacht hatte, sehr wichtig, aber in der Programme aber auch zu eliminieren. Ich möchte also die Frage markieren, die im Titel irgendwo ist. Mein Name ist Nishansha. Ich werde die neue politische Natur von Interventions- und Aktivitäten beobachten, mit der Technologie, die jungen Menschen in die Informations- und Sozialität zu sehen. Ich arbeite für eine Organisation, die im Internet und der Gesellschaft in Banglorendien ist. Ich möchte mit dieser bizarre Frage beginnen, was ein Digitalnative ist. Ich habe den Kurs von uns gelernt, wir haben diese Forschung gemacht, die seit zwei und ein halben Jahren noch Arbeit gemacht. Und jedes Mal, als ich einen Audienste entgegen habe, präsentieren wir, dass wir wissen, was ein Digitalnative ist. Ich möchte einfach mit einem Handling beginnen, wie viele Menschen die Digitalnatives im Sprach haben. Oh, wow, das ist sehr viel. Wenn ich die Digitalnatives entgegen und fragen, ob sie es gehört haben, dann geben sie mir eine blanke Schau. Es ist ein sehr kontentiver Termin, weil wir nicht immer sehr sicher sind, was ein Digitalnative ist. Es gibt viele examples, die wir haben, was ein Digitalnative macht. Ich bin sicher, dass ihr mich viele geben könntet. Jeden Tag, und vielleicht morgen, haben wir gehört, wie ein Digitalnative bloggt. Aber eigentlich nicht. Versteht, das Blogging ist jetzt der 20. Jahrhundert, und sie haben es noch nicht gemacht. Digitalnatives, Twitter, Digitalnatives, Revolutionäre, so und so. Aber was wir wirklich wollen, war, dass die Möglichkeit, die politische Politik, die traditionelle und unterstotende Domain aufpolitisch ist, zu beobachten. Wir beginnen mit dieser technische und soziale Identität des Digitalnatives, die immer im Digitalnative, die immer im Internet ist. Auf der einen Seite ist das Digitalnative ein globaler Citizen. Er oder sie verbinden mit Millionen Menschen auf der Internet, die das gleiche und die gleiche Dinge machen. Auf der anderen Seite ist das Digitalnative immer von Geografien, die in den besonderen Kontexten, in den Gesellschaften, in den Kulturen, in den Nationen und in den Nationenstaaten. Und da ist dieses zweitbeine Bind, das die Definition und die Veranstaltung der Digitalnative ist. Ich möchte meine Punkte vielleicht sehr klar machen. Auf der einen Seite sind Sie hyperterritorial, nicht bauend durch Ihre Skin-Kolour, Ihre Language, Ihre Nationalität, Ihre Ratsch, Ihre Religion und so weiter. Und gleichzeitig, die einzige Kredibilität, die Sie haben, wenn Sie online positen, um eine solche Intervention zu machen, ist das, dass Sie eine Nationalität haben, eine bestimmte Language, eine Insider, die in einem Körper und eine Geografie befindet. Es ist nicht so, dass ein Digitalnative in einer Ehr- oder Kategorie fällt, sondern dass sie zusammen in dieser zweitbeine Binde sind, die vielleicht interessant ist, zu folgen. Die äusseren Dinge, die wir eigentlich über Digitalnatives gesprochen haben, sind dieses zweitbeine Bind von Erwartung und Anzeichen. Ich beginne mit einer sehr, sehr kursorischen Definition von was ein Digitalnative ist. Mark Prensky, der vielleicht, zumindest sagt, dass er den Digitalnative beizubekommen, sagt, dass jemand, der nach den 1980ern geboren ist, ein Digitalnative, der im jüngsten Digitalnative jetzt über 30 Jahre alt ist, nicht noch geboren ist, weil er sich noch als Fetus, der jetzt digital ist, durch Sonogramm, durch Memogramm und so weiter, hat. Es gibt eine gewisse Weise, bei der die Digitalnatives, die ein größer Teil unserer Population sind, in den Noten der Erwartungen und Anzeichen gebunden sind. Was ich für euch möchte, ist, dass die ersten die meisten Erwartungen und Anzeichen, die im Digitalnative um die Digitalnative befinden, die im Digitalnative umgehen. Wir beginnen mit dem Fakt, dass das der dummste Generation ist. Ist es jemand in der Audienste, der mit dieser Formulierung aufsiegt? Danke. Ich möchte euch sagen, dass es jemand, der das vorhin gehört hat, dieses Lament, dass jungen Menschen nicht mehr denken, dass wir viele Menschen, die nur consumen und nichts anderes tun, sind. Mark Bollin hat ein Buch, das die Dummste Generation im Jahr 2007, wo er sagt, wie wir eine Generation, die sich vergessen hat, zu denken, dass wir alles hyperlink, alles, was wir tun, ist, dass wir alle Gedanken und Opinien reflektieren, ohne wirklich analysieren, über die sie. Das ist die Nummer 1-Anzeichen, die vielleicht alle übernimmt, die Professor in der Akademie, Forschern, politischen Gewinner, und so weiter. Die zweite Anzeichen ist, wie die Digitalnatives verdrückt und gefährlich sind. Das ist nicht wirklich überraschend. In der Englisch-Internet-Sage, da ist immer die Versunktion, dass es etwas addiktiv und drug-like ist. Wir haben nie über den User-Sinema gehört, wir nennen sie Cinemophiles. Wir haben nie über die User-Print-Technologien gehört, wir nennen sie Bibliophiles. Aber wenn wir über die Menschen, die Technologie benutzen, sind sie addiktiv zu Digitaltechnologien, sie sind User Internettechnologien. Es gibt eine gewisse Weise, bei der jemand, der diese digitalen Formen excessiv verdrückt hat, ist sofort auf die Menschen, die das als addiktiv und gefährlich sind. Eine Formulierung, die nun in eine sehr, sehr gefährliche Weise eine Lande wie China zu starten, Internet-Rehabilitation-Centren für junge Menschen zu starten. In 2009 gab es eine sehr spezielle Situation in China, in der ein junger Sturr, ich denke, ein Weltkraftwerke, eine MMORPG, die sehr bekannt ist, für ca. 36 Stunden auf die Strecke, und dann auf eine Bühne geflogen und nachher gelandet, weil er dachte, dass er das nicht mehr so gut fliegt. Nachher begann China die Internet-Rehabilitation-Centren, wo sie nun unplugged, verschwunden und physisch verholt werden, um die Usage der Internet-Technologien zu zu kürzen. Wir reden auch über die Digital-Native, die dann auch gefährlich sind. Das ist nicht wirklich sehr neu. Es gibt 6 oder 7 Jahre über die Schulschutze von rundherum im Welt, wo jungen Menschen, die Video-Games gespielt haben, mit den Armstuhl und Immunisten, mit den Schulen und den Kollegen und Lehrer schotten. Es gibt eine bestimmte Formulation der Digital-Native, die das gefährlich ist, die auch sehr in den Weg ist. Die dritte Idee, die ich möchte, ist wirklich einfach die Kulturen, die kalt sind. Wer, der dort ist, oder jemand, der seit 10 Jahren ein Student war, hat sich auf eine Ausstattung mit einem Eidraubreis gesehen und gesagt, woher man diese Informationen hat, ist natürlich die Übersetzung von Wikipedia. Jetzt haben wir 2 Wartungsfaktionen. Es gibt Leute, die die Wikipedia verabschieden und die, die es verabschieden. Die, die es verabschieden, sind die Menschen, die immer immer auf die Wartung geplagt haben, dass niemand mehr originales Wartung zu tun hat. Wir leben in einem Welt, wo Digital-Nativeen so leicht sind, dass es kein Distinkt gibt und es nicht mehr so viel wie in der Welt. Das nächste Anzeichen ist über den Räse der Skrinäger. Haben die Leute den WALL-E gesehen? WALL-E? Ja? Viele von euch. Die apokalyptische Foto, die WALL-E hat, wo es Leute sind, die auf den Kouchen sitzen und die mit sich nur durch mobile Interfaces oder Skrins interactieren, ist etwas, was uns die Menschen, die in dieser Audienz sitzen, nicht zu sehen, aber nur auf der Skrinäger oder Laptops oder iPods oder was auch. Es gibt eine gewisse Anzeichen über die Menschen- Relationschaft, die Menschen- Kommunikation, die Detaillierung. Es gibt keinen Wissen für die Menschen, dass wir alles, was wir tun, nicht im Kouchen, so zu sagen. Also, das ist das. Und das letzte, was vielleicht ist, ist die Fakt, dass es eine extraordentliche Verkaufung der Verkaufung ist. Das, dass, während man viel Zeit auf Bloggeräte verabschiedet, was sie auf einem Blog schreiben, ist etwas, was ich für den Frühstück hatte. Das ist das ganze Syndrome meiner Bubble, meiner Space, das ist mein digitales Space, das ich gebildet habe. Und es wird jetzt nur zu meiner Zeit, eine Art Entertienmennung, das Social-Netzwerk und so weiter. Das ist der Liste der Anzeichen. Und das letzte, ist natürlich, dass die digitalen Nations eine Gefahr sind. Denn in 20 Jahren, eine große Teil der Bevölkerung wird nicht mehr students oder Kinder sein. Die Universität, Arbeitsplätze, politische Organisations und die Menschen, die die Internet-Geräusche verabschiedet haben, sind ein bisschen angenehmer, die digitalen Nations mit der Technologie und der Internet-Geräusche verabschiedet haben. Das ist der erste, dass die ganze Fertigung der Internet-Geräusche ist. Es wurde die Wettbewerb für jedes evil, das in dem Welt war. Die Internet-Geräusche, wie jede andere Technologie, war supposed to make universal brotherhood and world peace more than just a beauty pageant- quotient. But it's not really worked out that way. And there is a certain celebration of the free that remains very confused. Well, there is free as in beer, und liberiert von bestimmten Schäkeln. Ich weiß nicht, wer die kommenden Demonstraten sind. Microsoft ist eine neoliberale Economy. Google ist in der neuen Bad Wolf und so weiter. Es gibt eine bestimmte Verbreitung von Freude, die sehr leicht geäußert wird, wenn man über junge Leute und die Ersatzungen über sie sprechen. Der zweite und der größte Teil vielleicht ist das von Toleranz. Wenn jemand online im Gespräch mit den Forums oder in verschiedenen Richtungen, in denen Leute interactieren, dann endet man von der Meinung, dass wir uns in Toleranz coexisten. Nicht in Ersatzung, sondern in Toleranz. Das ist eine neue politische Verbreitung, die online geäußert ist. Du bist falsch, ich bin falsch, und wir werden beide falsch zusammen. Beide, die einen Negation oder einen Dialog haben, haben wir eventuell einen Kompromiss von Toleranz, in dem ich toleriere, dass du ein Idiot bist, und du tolerierst, dass ich stupend bin. Und wir werden uns auch mit allen interactieren. Das ist ein sehr spezielles Problem, das kommt in. Der nächste ist um Diversität, und es ist dieses Content. Wie viele braunen Leute in der Audienste heute? Wirklich? Wie viele Asians heute? Keine? Ja, Asians? Leute aus Asia? Das ist das eine? Das ist sicherlich divers. Wir sollten jetzt bezeihten. Damit wir alle zu beruhen und Ihnen sprechen können, dass mini FokUn, wir müssen uns hen ist es nicht anders, um in deinem Sprache zu sprechen, als wenn der Person in dieser particular Community verabschiedet wird. Wenn ich jetzt in Hindi sprechen und sagen, dass ich in diesem Sprachsprecher sprechen werde, dann ist es ein plötzlicher Standstill. Es gibt nur Diversität, wie viele Menschen uns so wie wir sind, während sie noch anders sind. Und diese Diversität muss mehr fragen, statt der Zelt, die passiert, als wir über die Digitalen Nationsen sprechen. Der nächste Punkt ist die Kollaboration und die Vorgang. Ich denke, dass es viel zu viel gesagt wurde. Ich denke, dass es viel Interessent ist, was es in den Intellektuellen Rechtsregime anzusehen, die wir erstaublich haben und was viele Corporate-Konglomerate versuchen, jetzt zu kämpfen. Dass es einen bestimmten Wert gibt, die die Kollaboration und die Wissen der Kräufe haben. Aber ich weiß nicht, dass jemanden, der mehr als drei Jahre unter den Gräben stammt, nur die Wissen der Kräufe sparen kann. Ich bin nicht sicher, wie viel Wert es gibt. Und ob es die Faservalue hat, dass alles, was die Kräufe gesorgen ist, wichtig ist, die Faktoren und die mehr intelligenten Art der Produktion der Knowledge zu beobachten. Wir haben ein tolles Präsentation gestern, der mitolla, so wie das Internet schaffen soll, für diesnaut vom Autosatzen und nicht zum Teil an. Das ist die Technik, die wir mit überw Chevy weiter більern scissors stellen. In Gloria der soziale Transformation, die sich auf digitalen Netus enthalten. Es ist nicht ein neues Phänomen. Mit jeder neuen Technologie in der Geschichte des Weltraus, gibt es immer eine bestimmte Art der Erwartung, die auf die Jugend aufgetan ist, der die Technologie besser als der, der die Wörter der Welt aufkommt. Wenn wir die Geschichte der Revolution in almost jeder Zivilisation schauen, breathtakingen wir das, dass jungen Leute eine neue Technologie uses, für das entsprechende lustige Event può. Das ist nicht neu. Doch neu weil du nicht ein Internet-Guru bist, wo du nicht 10.000 Menschen in deinem Kontext teilnehmen. Es ist ein Falschprojekt, oder so, oder so. Wir schauen uns an diese Digital-Native. Ich habe gesagt, dass ein digitales Nativ ist. Was du hast, ist eine Liste und eine Littinie. Was die Leute tun, was sie erwartet, was die Anzeichen sind, die wir haben, was wir da sind. Aber niemand versucht, was ein digitales Nativ ist. Das ist der Punkt für die Arbeit, das wir jetzt machen. Es ist aus diesen Kontexten, die ich über 3 Jahre lang im Internet habe, die sich an die Digital-Natives und Klowns und Gesterns anschauen. Es gibt 3 Formen, die Digital-Natives mit uns bekannt sind, die Digital-Natives und die Gesterns, die Vandalismus, die Piracy, die Hacks, die Regen-Gewertssysteme, die Pranker und Jokes auf einem sehr großen Level. Das 2. Wie Digital-Natives und Gesterns das performieren und enteinen. Die machen Podcasts über Personal-Tipps in der Welt. Gestern, die Deutschen haben es seit einem langen Zeit gemacht, mit Publik-Pinises, wie es gestern gesagt wurde. Aber es gibt eine bestimmte Art, mit der man die Technologie, die man auf die Anbrennungen zu sam simplified Fiano aus den curvatureialen toizens HaloPodmas halte ich gestern um桿 verk yeter zu India Mediart und die Pink-Chubby-Kampagne war eine der größten digitalnations-Kampagnen, die letzten Jahr begonnen wurde. Es spricht nicht wirklich von Politik, in dem wir die politischen Sinne verstanden haben. Und das ist die Geschichte. In den ersten 2009, da waren ein paar Rechtwirkende Aktivisten, die sich auf Frauen, die zu Pubs oder Bars, oder zu Schmuck oder zu Westen und Kleidung, schema którą Neptune fanden, Aggression erfunden, das orange Protect-Rolle wird Die Reaktion von der Presse von der Medien war eine Schock- und Horror-Schuld. Aber es war nicht viel gemacht. Nach fünf Tagen der Medienverkaufs-Schuld, die News war zugegelt, es gab nichts Interessantes. Das nächste große Ding war, dass die Hooligans auch entschieden haben, dass wenn sie einen Couples-Dating auf Valentines-Date gefunden haben, sie sie für sie verheiratet werden. Wir gehen mit einem Priester, und wenn sie einen Mädchen und ein Mädchen finden, ist es immer nur ein Mädchen und ein Mädchen, es ist nie ein Mädchen und ein Mädchen. Aber wenn sie einen Mädchen und ein Mädchen finden, werden sie sie verheiratet werden. Es gibt viele Striche, bei denen das Rechtwien-Gewerter versucht, ein bestimmtes Rechtwien-Fundamentalist zu impfen. Die Exploratives werden ausgerichtet, eine schlechte Form der Politik in der Stadt. Viele Frauen, die in den Gästen des Frauen verursachten, mobilisieren sich um das Erwähnen, und verlieben sich, wenn sie ein traditionelles Gefühl der Politik machen. Es gab viele, wie ich gesagt, Mediendiskurs, die nicht funktionierten. Die Campaign, die erfolgreich war, wurde von einem jungen Mädchen, Nisha Susan, der eine Facebook-Kampagne begonnen hat, die die Pink Chuddy-Kampagne genannt hat. Auf der Campaign hat sie eine Facebook-Page geöffnet, und sie hat die Leute für Pink Unterrichtung gebraucht, und sie hat sie zu den politischen Leaders, die diesen Rechtwien-Gewerter als wichtigsten Bewegungen unterstützen. Es wurde ein wildes Feuer. In einer Woche waren es 200.000 Pink-Panzen, die als das kleine Politische Mensch im der gesamte System der Network, der sozialen Networks, der Menschen, die Gruppen und die Kommunen verabschieden und der große Kommunität der jungen Menschen in Indien, die dann eine signifikante Intervention auf einem politischen Level machen konnten, die nicht möglich war, bevor dies ging. In einem Kistenario, in dem traditionelle Politik von Frauen- und Rechtsverwaltungen verzerrte eine Intervention, mit einer sehr, sehr spätzeln, irreveren Intervention, die digitalen Nations mit dem sie etwas erreichen konnten, das war fantastisch. Für die Indien, aber auch für die Süddeutsche, vielleicht, war das erste Indikation, wie wir uns die Zeit für politische Engagement nachdenken müssen. Während es internationales Storien gibt, wie die questionable Twitter-Revolution in Iran, müssen wir wirklich auf die Werte, in denen neue politische Formulations, neue politische Engagement möglich sind, weil jungen Menschen die Präsentation und die Nutzung von digitalen Technologen sind. Was Nisha und unsere Gang gemacht haben, war keine langen Politik, die wir in Asien haben verstanden. Es war keine langen Campaign, in dem Sie eine Strecke-Demonstration haben. Es war nicht eine Petition, die die Regierung zurückgegangen hat. Es war nicht ein Rennstück für die Krei. Es war ein Kopfhörer, ein Problem, das in ihrem immediate Umgebiet war. Es war mit Spaß, mit Joy, mit Spaß zu spielen und konnte eine extra Nummer von Menschen mobilisieren, die als apathetisch als politische Situation im Land waren. Das war das erste Storien, das ich Ihnen geholfen habe. Durch die Frage von Pranks, durch die Gestöpfung, durch die Kläunung, die Menschen, die etwas sehr interessante Dinge machen. Als eine Offschuh der Pink Chutney Campaign, hatten wir auch sehr interessante Campaigns. Einzelne war die Pubbharo, die hindi-wirdige Wortpufferung. Wir hatten auch eine Woche von vielen, vielen Frauen, die die Pubs haben und die sie geübt haben, um einen Punkt zu machen, dass das ihre öffentliche Spass ist und sie es in any way es möglich ist. Es war nicht ein großer NGO oder eine Entwicklungssektor-Agenz, um die Campaign zu mobilisieren, aber es war online. Die zweite Geschichte ist aus China, in der wir eine Geschichte von 10 legendarischen, offensivischen Biesten in China haben. Hier ist ein Briefkontext. In 2008, glaube ich, war Wikipedia in China geban. Für die Grundschaft, was alle darüber gesprochen haben. Die Banne von Wikipedia war ein Buhnt zu dieser spezielle ISP, der Internet-Service-Provider, der Baidu. Baidu ist der größte Internet-Service-Provider in China, in Mainland China, und sie hat ein Wikipedia-like Site, das heißt Baidupedia. Baidupedia ist in China live in Ordnung, weil es sich selbst verspricht. Es ist komplett in Bezug auf die China-Sensorschef-Polizisten, um was online zu retten, was artikuliert zu können, und was die Information ist, die in dieser Sprache ist. Interessant ist, dass Baidupedia auch ein brillant Pleasure-M mechanism, in dem es Wikipedia-Artikel durch die Sensorschef-Polizisten filterst, und sie auf Baidupedia selbst aufbaut. Auf Baidupedia, der dann supposed zu sein ist, war es ein Stichwort von Vandalismus. Aber es war nicht Vandalismus in der traditionellen Sinne. In dem Sinne, dass es nicht jemanden verharmt war, es gab keine Leibel, keine Schlange. Aber ein Grupp von Aktivisten kam zusammen, um diese eine einzelne Page zu kreieren, die die 10 legendarischen Obscen-Beasts der China genannt. Was sie gemacht haben, war, dass sie einen extraordinarien profanen Langgern zu sprechen, die Politik und die Regierung zu sprechen, in einem bestimmten Weg. So dass... Sind die Leute mit Mandarin als Langgern familliert? Okay, können Sie sich schnell durch eine kleine Kurs in der Linguistik in Form des Langgerns verabschieden? Ein simplifier Mandarin hat vier Tonen, sodass jeder Wort hat vier Tonen, und depending upon the tone, die Artikulierung des Wortes verabschiedet. Wenn ich sage, ma, ma, ma, ma, da sind vier verschiedene Tatsache zu dem. Was diese Leute gemacht haben, war, dass sie die Phonetik-Possibility erhielten, und diese Charakteren, die die extrem profanen Namen ausgespelt haben, eine der ersten und die bekanntesten, die die Chow Nima sind, die, wie sie beobachtet, ist eigentlich ein Mudd-Grasch-Horst. Aber wenn Sie das korrekt sprechen, wie es supposed zu sein ist, die Chow Nima, das dann heißt,Impf-Beweg zu machen, das sind nicht alle. Alladium Lord Stيع° 2000 Wölfe, Ich habe das getreut. versus auf Wag sna waren. Ich Khan Rs.-Z B. Ouang, Objekte wie die Chaunima, die politisch weniger als die Pink-Chaddi-Kampagne, die so in dem Domain der Intervention machen. Man beginnt zu realisieren, dass es mehr zu diesen Pranks ist, als nur Pranksterspielen. Dass die Kondition der Technologie diese Menschen potenziell politisch engagiert werden, in denen traditionelle Politik nicht immer wirklich verstanden ist. Ich kann nicht imagine, dass eine Gesellschaft oder eine politische Organisation einen Intervention machen, um einen Vandalismus zu schaffen, in einem speziellen Raum zu machen. Dass es die Empfehlung dieser digitalen Nationen in diesen Situationen ist, die das erlaubt, sie in einer neuen Form zu spielen, mit digitalen Technologien, mit kultureller Produktion und mit verschiedenen Noten der politischen Intervention. Ich spreche sehr viel und sehr schnell, ich gebe Ihnen einen Briefesprache. Was ich Ihnen als schämes Plug zeigen möchte, dass meine Freunde in Thailand in 2006 gemacht haben. Ich war ein Teil des Projekts, in Thailand und Bangkok zu kämpfen gegen Fragen der globalen Warnung. 200 schulige Kinder kamen in den Städten von Bangkok zu begangen. Das ist eine Dramatisation, und ich spreche ein bisschen mehr über das. So much I need to say, I can't confide. Something in the air, it says that you're not there. It's so hard to get it through, cause you don't care. No more begging you please, it's not out of reach. I bet in a new way, make it worthwhile. Open your eyes, I know that you can. Begging you please, begging you please. So why don't you learn, I hope you know. Leave yourself spread across the land. And make it shine, shine. Begging you please. Thank you. I think it's an extraordinary campaign, because global warming is a real issue for Thailand. It's a small island, it's sinking. Almost every day you can see it's sinking. The government has spent more than one billion US dollars now on trying to promote awareness around global warming campaigns. Not too much effect. Does anyone want to guess how much money was spent in making this particular campaign viable? About 30 US dollars? Because we had to buy some cheap phones to do the shooting, which is where the resolution isn't really very good. But the thing is, that the person, the group of people who started this campaign, the oldest person was 16 years old. That they came together to mobilize their own people, which was people in schools, young school children and so on, to come to the streets of Bangkok on every Sunday to beg for awareness around global warming. The campaign has now been taken up by the government of Thailand as this national campaign, so that it invites now everybody who comes to Bangkok to come begging on the streets. Since the campaign, Thailand has reduced its carbon footprint by 23% in three years. So I'm just trying to give you an idea of how there are new ways of political engagement. There is a certain thing about collaboration and mobilization, which is not restricted to large numbers of people coming on the streets for demonstrations, for campaigns, for rallies and so on. But that there is a very strategic use of technology, which enables very young people to deal with immediate crisis in their environment in very, very interesting ways. That it sometimes looks like games, and you know, it looks like flashmob, and it looks like different forms of entertainment. It looks like they are embedded in a system, where they seem to be reproducing or doing things for fun and games. But that there is a certain political potential, which is embedded in these. And the kind of work that we are doing is trying to raise awareness among the young people about the use of their technology, and the ways in which they can indeed, if they want to, change the world. I want to leave you with one last story. This is more perhaps international, but probably more popular in Europe. Are you familiar with Matt Harding? Yeah? Okay, does anybody want to ask me who the hell is Matt Harding? All right, let's do a group exercise. On the count of three, I want you to scream. Who the hell is Matt Harding, right? Okay, one, two, three. Right, it's the right question. No, it's the wrong question. The question to ask is where the hell is Matt Harding? Matt Harding is a nomadic dancer, who goes from one city to another to dance with people. He was 26 when he started his first campaign. He was based out of the US, and his job was to make violent video games about the end of the world. He decided that he's fed up of his job, and that what he really wants to do is do something about questions of universal brotherhood, about opening up boundaries of culture, of society, of politics, and so on. And so he decided to do away with his job and go dancing across the world. In the first three years of his life and of his dancing life, Matt Harding produced three videos, some of the most popular videos ever seen on YouTube. And the videos were always called Where the Hell is Matt Harding? He became extremely popular, and so now he's now the brand ambassador for many things. I'm also going to show you one of his videos right now. But Matt Harding basically has become an icon for young people who want to talk about questions of peace, questions of cultural exchange, and questions of harmony without sounding too cheesy and miss-beauty-päsentisch about it. In the last video, one last explanation about it, and then we can go into question-and-s answers. This is the third video from the series Where the Hell is Matt, and it starts in India. This is the third video from the series. Ich habe mich gefreut, ich habe mich gefreut, ich habe mich gefreut, ich habe mich gefreut. Das ist Matt Harding, ihr könnt auf sein Website gehen, er stammt jetzt in einem Schedule, um ihn in der Danse zu kommen. Matt Harding war ein interessantes Phänomen, weil er eine Einwohnerin, die seine Populärität auf YouTube hat, zu verleihen, eine bestimmte Dialog, um Fragen der Kultur und der Bruderheit, um die Universalität und so weiter zu machen. Dieses Video ist jetzt auf NASA's Zeitcapsule. Sind die Leute sicher, dass NASA ein Zeitcapsule hat? Wenn es morgen ein Muturite kommt und die Menschen-Zivilisation eröffnet, dann muss es ein paar Träger sein, die den Aliens, die kommen, und sie sehen, dass wir es haben. NASA hat ein Zeitcapsule der größten Momenten in der Menschen-Zivilisation geöffnet. Dieses Video ist jetzt auf der Zeitcapsule. Es ist auf der Welt auf der Planeten-Earth zu Musik verabschiedet. Matt Harding ist ein unglaubliches Phänomen. Er hat jetzt auch Matt Harding-Danzen-Gruppen, wo Leute in der kommunalen Kommunikation und im Kontext zusammen auf eine regularen Basis kommen, um zu kommen, um zu dansen. Es gibt eine gewisse Art, mit der Danzen, die Spielvollkeit, um zusammen zu machen, die nicht immer einen Sinn haben, starten zu werden, ein extrem starkes politisches Tool. Die Werte, in denen Leute über Matt Harding, wo er dort geht, und die Leute mit ihm dansen, Matt Harding ist jetzt, glaube ich, in mehr als 80 Citys dansen, mit mehr als 85.000 Menschen, die sich auf die Werte auf die Werte aufnehmen. Ich wollte nur die Beziehung zu den Fakten, dass die Leute, wie Matt Harding, nicht nur um die Musik und die Fun, sondern auch um die Potenzien zu mobilisieren und zu initiieren, sehr starken politischen Dialogs, die wir sonst nicht verstehen, wenn wir an Jugend- und Technologien starten, dass eine Art, unvergessliche Unterrichtung von Politik und traditionellen Unterrichtung und Verwaltung ist, dass die Menschen, die die Werte aufnehmen, nicht mit den viralen Ideologien und Formen, die die Internet populieren, ich möchte euch dann mit der Frage wieder<|id|><|transcribe|> der Indonesian Digital Natives, causes, pauses, When looking at popular discourse. We presume that the digital natives are going to make a difference, but we do not understand that the digital natives are also a part of a change. aber wir verstehen nicht, dass die Digitalnatives auch ein Teil einer Veränderung sind. Es scheint eine bestimmte Dichotomie zu sein, in der wir die Welt ändern, und dass alles, was sie machen, außerhalb des Lebens, sofort auf die Suspektion geschaut wird. Es gibt eine bestimmte Weise, in der ein Rhetorik oder ein Diskurs von einer sozialen Konstruktion der Lose des Digitalnatives überwiesen wird. Wir haben sehr standardweise die Digitalnatives und die Lose des Innersens, über wie die Kinder sich viel schneller entwickeln, dass sie nicht mehr wirklich sehr innersen sind. Jetzt spielt sie eine Schuhe. Okay, da ist jemand, der es spielt. Ich weiß nicht, was du auf dem Lied machst. Aber es gibt eine bestimmte Lose des Innersens, die immer ein Teil der Utilien und Technologie ist. Die zweite Lose ist etwas, das vielleicht schon die erster Zeit der Konkurrenz der Stärken ist, die über die Fragen der Privilegien, die die Lose des Kontrollens in den Falle des Digitalnatives machen, mit den Losen, die nicht bewusst sind, die Art von Implikationen, was sie in den Digitalen Welten tun. Es gibt auch die Frage der Lose des Ethos, der Ideologie, der Verteilung und so weiter. Wir wollen hier etwas stoppen und die Lose des Narratives stoppen und schauen auf sie als eine Narrative des Veränderungs. Was passiert ist, dass es eine bestimmte Transition ist, die die Digitalen Revolutionen bringen. Und dass diese Transition nicht nur ein schlechtes, sondern auch, dass es nur, wenn wir von den Vantage-Punkten des 1980s an den 2000er Jahren schauen, dass wir denken, dass es etwas falsch ist mit dem Welt, dass die jungen Menschen nicht wirklich respondent zu den Politikern der Zeit sehr interessiert. Aber wenn wir starten, schauen wir uns die Werte, in denen sie die Lose des Politikern verstehen, sie versuchen, zum Beispiel die Veränderung der Politik von politisch zu kulturisch zu machen, wo sie in bestimmten Kliniken von Kultur, Information und Entertainment, Industrie und Produktion in der Zeit, um ein politisches Punkt zu machen, das scheint eine neue Narrative der Digitalen Natives zu werden. Eine, die weniger verblieb ist als die, die ich mitgegeben habe, eine, die mehr Hoffnung hat, eine, wo wir sagen können, dass, während alles mit dem Welt nicht hunkend ist, während es immer nicht so ist, wie sie supposed zu sein, es gibt eine jungen Generation, die uns die Probleme und unsere Politik und die Technologien, die sie mit sehr interessiert sind, die uns in sehr interessierten Wahlen erinnern. Ich werde hier stoppen und fragen, ob es da ist. Wir produzieren eine Digitalen Natives Report, die nun für eine freie Download für dieses Website ist, die die Organisation, in der ich arbeite. Das ist auch meine E-Mail-Adresse, wenn ihr euch zu mir oder bei einer Konversation über die Arbeit, die wir machen. Vielen Dank. Bichenschah, gibt es Fragen? Dann wäre jetzt die Mö... Ja, einfach zum Mikrofon, dort in einem... Ja, rennen muss man jetzt nicht, aber kann man gerne. Ich würde gerne eine Frage zu den Audiensten hier haben. Sorry, ich bin blind. Ja, wer kann die Frage aussehen, ob ihr eine Digitalen Natives in diesem Audienstil seid? Wenn Sie uns fragen, wer hier sich über die Digitalen Natives... Wer sieht, dass es eine Digitalen Natives gibt? Sehr viele von uns. Sehr gut, meine Frage war, gestern hat wir zwei, in other words, Digital Residents und Digital Visitors. Mein Geist, okay, ja. Das ist ein Punkt, das ich euch fragen möchte. Wenn Sie mich fragen, ob ich eine Digitalen Natives wäre, dann würde ich sagen, nein. Aber wenn ich eine Digitalen Residenz sage, ist das etwas anderes. Was ist das für Sie? Eine der Dinge, die wir versuchen, zu sagen, ist, dass wir nicht in zwei Haare-Splittungen gehen, die Digitalen Natives, Digital Settlers, Digital Migrants, Digital Residenzen, es macht keinen Unterschied. Am Ende des Tages ist es nicht darum, wie lange man Technologie benutzt, aber wie familiar und komfortabel man mit Technologie ist. Meine 63-jährige Grandmother hat Gugratis-Blogs, die ein vernachlässigeres Langebüchern in Gugrat. Sie hat ein iPod, sie hat ein Handy, sie hat ein Photoblog, sie ist ein Digitalen Natives, sobald ich mich interessiert. Es ist nicht darum, die Digitalen Natives zu verabschieden, dass die Marketing-Kompanien für Sie entwickeln, die sagen, dass die Leute zwischen der Age-Gruppe digitalen Natives sind, weil sie diejenigen, die die die fähigste elektronische Gadgete consume. Was Sie wirklich müssen, ist nicht, wie die Digitalen Natives die Power-User der Technologie sind, sondern die Digitalen Natives die Menschen, die ihre Leben verabschieden, weil sie die Presse der Technologie sind. Das ist ein großerer Argument, das wir schauen. Wenn wir nur die Leute, die 24-7 connecten, die immer auf Facebook sind, die tweeten, die politisch politisch sind, das wäre 0,02% der Population in der Welt. In den Informations-Sozieten, besonders in den Informations-Sozieten, gibt es eine große Menge Menschen, die ihre Leben restrukturieren, ihre Leibungen, die die Politiker und die Kollaborationen, weil sie die Presse der Digitalen Natives sind. Für uns und jeder, der die Technologie mit unterschiedlichen Wahlen verabschieden ist, ist ein Digitalen Natives, weil sie nicht Technologien, die in den Wahlen verabschieden sind, sondern die Technologien, die ihre eigene Wahlen und die Umwelt verabschieden sind. Ich würde mir sagen, dass die, die Kooperate, die die Mechanismen, die man segregieren will, in eine Demografie und die Menschen, die die Digitalanic Galπό Wir haben eine. Eine Frage. die Ökonomik der digitalen Nations, die für ihre Aktivitäten bezahlen? Und wie können sie die netzwertige Informationen der Ökonomie adaptieren? Was haben sie für die Jobs? Und wie sehen sie ihre Zukunft in der Ökonomie? Die Ökonomie ist vielleicht eine der leichtesten Fragen, die es zu digitalen Nations kommt. Es ist besonders, dass in den Entwicklungsnaturen, die Länder, die selbst investieren, in ein verdammtes Geld, in den Entwicklungsinfrastruktur und den Anliegen der Anliegen. In Indien, für Beispiel, haben wir eine Mission, called Vision 2020, in der 80% der Indien-Propagnen im Jahr 2020 via Internet und online verbunden werden. Aber das ist eine sehr einfache Antwort. Ich denke, es ist etwas, das hier viel mehr zu spät ist, als zu sagen, dass wir nicht über Technologie, die Lösungen und Antworten geben, denken, und nicht, dass sich jeder eine equale Aktionen für Technologie braucht. Dass die Aktion zu Technologie nicht nur Material ist, sondern auch an Internet klicken, ist auch erforderlich. Es ist auch auf der Ebene der Imagination, in einer Form oder anderen. Dass die Kommunen und die Leute decidegen, was die Anliegen für sie selbst brauchen, based auf die Krise, die sie in ihrem eigenen Kontext identifizieren. So dass, wenn es ein Grupp von Leuten, die Technologie zu Aktionen braucht, in der Sie die Fragen der Leiblichkeit anschauen, dann lässt sie die Technologien von diesen verschiedenen Angeln, sondern an Microsoft zu<|el|><|transcribe|> der Landung, ein globales Aktionen-Protokoll für die ganze Nation. Ich hoffe, ich werde die Frage beantworten, die ist, dass es mehr zu der Ökonomik als die Leiblichkeit ist, dass es auch Fragen der Entitelung, der Legen, der Kultur, der Heritage, der Belohnung, der Nationalität und so weiter, die auch eine Teil der digitalen Native Identität sind. Wir wollen nicht einfach das zu einer basicen Frage, was die Anliegen für die Leiblichkeit ist, für die Battle des 이러 무
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As a growing population in emerging Information Societies, particularly in Asia, experience a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young digital natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the digital natives across the globe are so entrenched in practices of incessant consumption that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilisation and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production as trivial or unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the Digital Natives are engaging in practices which might not necessarily subscribe to the earlier notions of political revolution, but offer possibilities for great social transformation and participation. The oldest Digital Native in the world – if popular definitions of Digital Natives are accepted – turned 30 this year, whereas the youngest is not yet born. In the last three decades, a population has been growing up born in technologies, and mediated their sense of self and their interactions with external reality through digital and internet technologies. These interactions lead to significant transitions in the landscape of the social and political movements as the Digital Natives engage and innovate with new technologies to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments. However, more often than not, these experiments remain invisible to the mainstream discourses. The mechanics, aesthetics and manifestation of these localised and contextual practices hold the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the future. This presentation looks at three different case studies to look at how, through processes and productions which have largely been neglected as self indulgent or frivolous, Digital Natives around the world are actively participating in the politics of their times, and also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation.
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10.5446/21250 (DOI)
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exempla tali Ergeba provea fina zdrow Rexha dhiocre <|am|><|transcribe|> bb irecting par ɛ dɔUtsGHTав foster و Laban qaizin t 늒atsu tyk ten Memphis basmail bagblog care na add traditional jury parcel and ampn ofSchul jay ba Deutcheville, qualitiaan hän den Bob's Best of Blogs award – award for the world's best webblogs, podcasts and video blogs. Blogs from all around the world in 11 different languages were eligible to enter and we've had a really enormous amount of number of submissions this year. 18,016 blogs from all over the world were submitted to the Bob's Panel. An international jury of bloggers who should win the award. I'm sure many bloggers are watching this on the livestream. Waiting impatiently to find out what the jury has decided. I can tell you, there were some heated discussions going on there behind closed doors. Well, for all of you, Bob's awards won a bee winners. We've visited the bloggers who won the Bob awards in the last year. 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So the first blogging practice would be practice of.. binder tele so it is a kind of lack of activity, of putting a link, Sort of forest right in front of the developing falando PUTSE at least for my perspective, but then, as I said before, there is no such thing as the blog. Again, there are so many different practices, topics, cultures, languages. As they are, Stephanie said, there are like, literally hundreds of millions bloggers out there, so you could say that there are literally more than hundreds of millions of blogging practices. So that I go to my second argument then, what is, what are the similarities? Well, if you look at the way people use the tools to engage in discussion, rhy えy xn n and refine them, they share some knowledge and so they are distributed conversations which connect different blocks. So in this respect, blocks are different space than for example chat rooms or social network sites, or discussion boards because blocks and the conversations between blocks are distributed over different places. So this leads to the second part of the argument. If we have a look at the different distributed conversations, wszy 就 ru br었어요. wszy. It pelvis in the international blogger empirical bash, but heric strangers and destubutł viaje na bay b chais gangen réchmit atta peeple resh fundamental Form langorge blockers fiers to叔 amai wasn char war cart bi xx ko automat intrinsic connected blocks. Fäft eru eggs. about marketing if you want to do min kzept plus sters you might si裡ha phats interns the thing of people who blog about equator lick mon blog föl föl föl dz different fungshions, bha dz the connections between the blogz through hyper-links, tru comments, tru track-backs, help foster a distributed conversations and networks of connected blogs. Mha dz third argument then is, waw, the topic of what do we know, actually, about the international blogosphere, and from the research perspective, I'd say, well, unfortunately, we don't know very much. inversionama u�니다 kym fion zum rendesa Flrek gen sekơi nd i Certain bi akt Ex mor e an gj답 cardboard. Our rectangular wo pob li nigleg't నినిన్తార్గిలాన stewardsన్భల నినిన Soc Wand internetberger Kor insan app నినిన్టి standards మామికాటీ Integrating టూటిఖూనిన్టీ మాడికటా occurred directly wa presuphe besfirl bang Dortse well sac last 8 chloride zurasозganpar pretestive n Anyways got obstet والая on nd the good examples what blogging can do in different countries. That's why I'm proud to be part of the Bob Awards. That's why I'm looking forward to the winners of this year's award. Thank you. nd moment nè. nd thank you very much. nd thanks for being with us today. nd thank you Jan. nd right. nd to decide who deserves to win a Bob's Awards. Deutsche Welle has brought together nd international jury. nd some bloggers from all around the world. nd some new media experts. nd they've traveled here to nd to Berlin from nd a lot of different countries. nd they've come from China, nd Bahrain, nd Indonesia, nd Iran, nd Brazil, nd France, nd Russia, nd the US. nd of course they're here tonight. nd why don't you get up, show yourselves. Let's give a round of applause to our jury for the Bob's Awards. nd I hear it's been very very high. nd I hear it's been very very hard to decide who should win. nd it took two strenuous days of discussing nd voting nd so on so forth. nd we actually snug in with the camera. nd so let's have a look at what happened behind the closed doors. nd behind the store the jury is deliberating, choosing the best web blogs of the year. What I know exactly is that there are 11 languages, international jury members, and a host of interesting web blogs. So let's take a look inside. nd what he does is, and this is a great tool. Well, I'm already inside the room nd no one seems to be taking the slightest notice. It seems quite busy in here. The debate about the best of blogs is obviously consuming all the mental resources. But what makes it so difficult to choose the best of the web blogs? It's very difficult because we have different criteria to select one, to choose one. The language is because for some part you can't understand the content. So you can't understand the beauty of the languages. For the first session in the morning, it wasn't really difficult because we were in a sort of consensus. Like many of the blogs that won, won with an overwhelming majority. But I think the real competition will start in the afternoon session with bigger prizes. Even during the lunch break, the jury members eat, drink and sleep vlogs and are still totally encroached in their discussion. What makes the work so interesting? Because you get the visions from other people, the other people in the jury that they bring things that you would never be able to know by yourself. Like even being in the internet, you can see the video, you can see. But you don't understand the whole picture. The 30 minute break is over and the jury is back at work. Let's see what has made blogging so important in the last couple of years. We are an open platform to say what the people want to say, whatever they say. Every year new blogs, new discussions and new winners. We are now in the last hour of the session and the jury is only one step away from the final results. It's been a long day and a lot of hard work. The jury has come to a decision and the results are in my hand. But I can't let you know just yet. We will find out in a minute just what they have decided. The Bob Awards, let me tell you, they are the largest international web blog awards. The largest as we heard because blogs in 11 different languages are eligible for voting. Languages such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian or Persian to name just a few. Now let's get started with the awards. And for that I would like to introduce one member of our international jury to you. He is an award winning writer and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of a blog called MediaShift of PBS. PBS is the American non-profit public broadcasting service. He also writes regularly for the online publishers association. And in his Twitter account he introduces himself as editor-in-chief of PBS MediaShift. A writer, a dad, a singer and a ridiculous maker, which I really liked. Please welcome with me from the US, Mark Laser. Mark, you ridiculous maker. Thanks for joining me. Happy to be here. Cause as much trouble as possible. Mark, I've read some of your stuff and it seems to me that unlike many other journalists, you're quite excited about the new media and all the options that it can have. All the opportunities that it can bring for traditional media. Tell us more. Media is telling us what's going on, but it's about us fact checking and doing the work of journalists as well. So it's a chance for journalists, also not a threat so everyone gets started. And I think they can work together and create something even better. Well, let's see some more. Your keynote speech, we're waiting for it. Okay. So the first award goes to, it's the best weblog in Arabic. And it goes to the Osama blog by Osama Romo. Not the Osama you might have thought. Osama Romo is a Jordanian who writes about social issues. He speaks to the entire Arab world covers politics, social issues, the economy and youth. And really speaks out to the Arab world about important issues that matter to them. Next up is the best weblog in Bengali. And the winner is Ali Mahmid's blog. And Ali is known as a pioneer in the young Bengali blogosphere, which you'll hear a little bit more about later. He writes in a very simple style. He has a humorous take on politics, social issues and daily life. He's the winner of the best Bengali blog. Next up is the best weblog in Chinese. And the winner is Ke Neng Ba, which is written by Jason Aang and his team. He's a young blogger who writes about technology and free access to the Internet. He discusses on his blog the recent decision of Google to not stop censoring its website. He represents the young generation in China that's wired, smart and socially conscious. And the next best Bob's best weblog winner is in English. And the winner is Tok Marako. It's a group weblog that is actually an open discussion and debate on social issues in Morocco and for people in the diaspora who used to live in Morocco or are living elsewhere in the world. It's a forum for bloggers to discuss taboos and restricted topics that don't usually go into the mainstream media in Morocco. Recently they had a discussion about International Women's Day and about women's issues in Morocco. Give it up for the Tok Marako blog. The next Bob's winner is the best weblog in French. And the winner is La Monolete by Agnes Mayard. And she's known for her beautiful writing which goes back to the roots of blogging as a personal diary. She's a woman, mother and business owner and she writes about global events. Give it up for the best weblog in French. And finally the domestic award, the Bob's for the best weblog in German. And it goes to Der Postion by Stefan Schirmen. Some of you may know this one. It's a beloved satirical paper that includes a story about Satanists joining the Catholic Church. Now that's a new trend happening. It's modeled on the onion, a satirical American newspaper, and is written in a style of a newspaper that also lampoon as the media. Give it up for the best weblog in German. Thank you Mark. Thanks and congratulations to the winners out there. We've got a live stream and live blogging of course so we should have some excited bloggers out there now. Well now once more we'll try to get closer to the core of what blogging means in our society today for democracy especially and especially when it comes to the traditional media and politics. I will speak about that with two members of our international jury. Please let's welcome on stage Lucy Morion and Jens Berger. Hi, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having us. So let me introduce Lucy. Lucy has quite an interesting job. She fights for jailed cyber dissidents and reporters. She hassles politicians and she works tirelessly with the mainstream media to get her point across. Lucy works for reporters without borders. Thank you. And then I've got Jens Berger with me. Jens is a German blogger, one of the most well-known German bloggers. He's blog is one of the most read once according to DeutscheBlogCharts.com. Well, it says that. And I think that his posts are very critical, insightful, analytical and they've got great photo montages. I love them. So there's Jens. Thank you for joining us today, both of you. So Jens in our western democracy where we are quite lucky and we have freedom of press more or less. Why do we need political bloggers at all? Yes, if you see the public opinion, you can compare it to a bunch of flowers. There are red roses, there are white lilies and yellow talips and even a little bit of nasty esters, of course. But the big media doesn't represent the whole scale of the public opinion. You only have the yellow tulips for example and the bloggers feels great job is to cover the whole bunch of flowers and to discuss things that the big media wouldn't discuss. You don't have very much controversy in the media in our times and other times it was different. And that's in my opinion is a function of the blogs. So I love that pictures. We users can all pick the flowers that we like. That's great. Jens, what would you say and Lucy, what would you say are examples where you feel that the traditional media has maybe failed in their reporting? I think the biggest failure was the financial crisis. You don't have critical coverage of the financial systems before the financial crisis appeared. International blogosphere, you had these critical articles for two weeks ago I think. There's a study from the Otto Brunner Stiftung has been published and the researchers, they take a look at the coverage in the classic media in the Tagesschau, the biggest German news format. And the big papers and they came to conclusion that all the media failed on full scale. Lucy, what's your view? Any examples? Pretty well known example is most American media didn't challenge enough the Bush administration claims regarding weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the war in Iraq. I think that's one of the most well known example. In another country like Malaysia as well as the traditional media are known for relaying the propaganda of the government. And this is a country where the bloggers are actually the one that are most believed by the people when something is published online. This is what people tend to believe. That's not so different in Germany when you look at Afghanistan war for example. You don't find any block who is in favour of the war in Afghanistan but in the classic media it's different. And the public opinion is that I think nowadays they are 80% of the public opinion they are against this war. So the bloggers are with the public opinion and the classic media are opposed to this. Well we will talk a bit more about the difficulties that bloggers face in internet restricting countries later but we will know the examples in Iran in China. We are very lucky in our western democracies. Still what would you to say what challenges do bloggers face here? Yes in Germany you can't compare it to countries like China or like Iran. But if the German bloggers want to be a part of the public opinion, want to go to the people then they must take a little bit more serious. And people who don't have much experience with the internet they distrust, often distrust bloggers and they trust the classic media. Of course this is a reason. When you read about or you hear about blogging in the classic media it always is always in a little bit lurky manner. Either the bloggers are nerds or geeks or in some cases they are even described as fools. Nerds or geeks not possible what are you talking about? But Mahatma Gandhi in the speed of fighter once said first they ignore you then they love you. Then they fight you and then you win. I hope we will make it without the fight. But we will win. Lucy what do you think you have worked in a lot of countries and with bloggers in a lot of countries internet restricting countries. What do you think could bloggers here learn from bloggers around the world. How could they all support each other better? Well I mean reporters without borders there is a lot of countries that do restrict the internet or press freedom more generally speaking. And it's true that when you look at those bloggers they can spend years in jail for a picture or a post to many. So they have another perspective about writing and I think it's something bloggers here in our democratic countries can learn from. The fact that it's important to be covering stories of general interest for the public. It's important to continue to hold those in powers accountable and something else. It's important to show solidarity with the people who do not experience the same sort of freedom of expression we have. Something very simple would be any of us here can actually take part in this fight against censorship. You just go online. You don't know you don't know the one of those software that help people get around censorship like Torr for instance. And then your computer can be part of this network of computers being used by Iranian or Chinese bloggers and Internet users to help them get around their great firewalls. That's a very easy thing to do and it would help greatly for the defense of online free speech worldwide. Right so I'm sure if anyone wants to offer their computer to bloggers and they don't know how they can ask Lucy after a program. And they can go online on our website www.rse.org and check out or we have a guide specifically for bloggers and cyber dissidents. So we have a lot of details on these techniques online. Great well thank you too for joining me. Thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you. Was a moment. Yes. So now already it's time for me to call Mark Glazer back onto the stage to hand out some more Bob's Awards. There's still some language awards to come. So let's give him a round of applause. There he is. I see the hat coming. Mark. Yay. Mark. There you are again. When you guys were voting and discussing I was very briefly allowed into the holy halls of the jury meetings. Or unholy. Well tell me first of all are you guys. Are you guys still speaking with each other. For the most part I think people are still speaking to each other. We actually there's a lot of camaraderie among the jury members. And I think even though we do get into some pretty heated debates and arguments we do still kind of kiss and make up afterwards. All right. I wasn't there for the kissing part. Sometimes. We heard that it's very hard to decide apparently you had took a long time. What made it hard for you personally to decide. Well I think the difficulty is that there are just so many good blogs that are nominated in their finalists and it's just very difficult to choose among them because one could be good for something and one could be good for something else and one's humorous and one's obscene and one's amazing and incredible. So they're just they're all over the map when you look at blogs. So sometimes it's difficult to make that decision. In the case of one very heated debate between myself and another jury member the other jury member just kind of talked himself out of it. And so that's how it worked out for me that time. Yeah I was lucky. Well done. Right. Well let's not make our nominees. Well they are laughing over there. Let's not make our nominees. One's not going to kiss me now. Let's not make our nominees wait any longer. Please go ahead present some more awards. OK. So next up if in the Bobs is the best web log in Indonesian and the winner is Katatan Rangan Angin Anginana by Ancho Renjoko. And this web log looks at social problems and history from a lay perspective and the motto of this blogger is at my whim with no deadline. So that give it up for the Indonesian best blog. The next one is the best web log in Persian and the winner is what kind of country do we live in a group blog by 27 men and women. This web log is a minimalist sarcastic and critical view of society and politics in Iran and the blog title is put at the end of each post. What kind of country do we live in. That's kind of a kind of an ironic comment on life in Iran. Give it up for the best web log in Persian. Next up is the Bob for the best web log in Portuguese. And the winner is Fisika Nave by Dulcedo Braz Jr. This one is about physics by a physics teacher who makes it very easy to understand is a fun way of learning about physics. A topic that a lot of people don't necessarily like. But a lot of other people would like to have this blog translated into other languages so they could understand physics more. He also shows people how 3D movies work in one of his blog posts. Give it up for the best web log in Portuguese. Next up is the best web log in Russian and the winner is Metcare.com by Ilja Kabanow. And this is a blog about people and irrational behavior. Ilja is a woman who combines coverage of new gadgets and technology with old books and traditions. Give it up for the best web log in Russian. And finally the last but not least the Bob for the best web log in Spanish. And the winner is La Vuelta Amundo de Asun Iricardo by Ricardo Rivalda. And this is a blog that you have to love. It's about a couple that on their 25th anniversary they're from Spain and they decided to travel the world and write about it on their blog. It's a journal of their adventures and they also give out information for others who want to make a similar trip around the world. Give it up for the best web log in Spanish. Thanks Mark. Thank you. And congratulations to the winners. Of course we'll have some more awards to come so we'll see him back here again soon. But now let's move on to something very different. Something that this set of events that we're going to be talking about now gave a new dimension to the importance of the Internet and blogs in particular. In June 2009 elections were being held in Iran and President Ahmadinejad won again. His main opponent Mirosin Musavi called the election results a dangerous charade. And that was the beginning of one of the biggest protest movements in Iranian history. The government as usual used violence to suppress the protests. But people still took to the street. On June 20 2009 riot police was sent out to disperse a big group of demonstrators and a young woman was shot and died. Her death became known as a symbol of the Green Revolution through the Internet. Our next report has more on that. Web users posted thousands of messages on Twitter and blogs as well as videos and photos. Worldwide websites carried green banners and avatars to show solidarity with the demonstrators. Neda's death became a powerful symbol in the struggle for human rights in Iran as demonstrators disputed the presidential election results. Since 1979 voicing dissent or protest in the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered blasphemy. Here dissidents being brought to court. In the weeks following the disputed presidential elections in 2009, some 4,000 protesters, dissident journalists and politicians were injured and arrested. Many thrown into prison. The protests however continued. The situation of the freedom of press in Iran is getting worse. International journalists are set free and then asked to leave the country. We fear there will soon be no more international journalists based in Iran. Iranian journalists are also being arrested in large numbers. At least 34 have been imprisoned. International broadcasters like the BBC and Deutsche Welle have been jammed. Tehran has become one of the world's worst offenders against press freedom. The international media were barred in Iran after the elections, but dissidents still managed to post videos of protests and riots on social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook. The Iranian government is putting bloggers on trial and blocking their sites, but they still managed to outwit state censorship and the internet remains the voice of free expression for the people. Well, we'll hear more about the censorship of bloggers in Iran and the situation there anyway from our Iranian jury member, which I'd like to introduce to you now. She is an Iranian journalist, a woman's right activist and a blogger in Iran. The world woman is being filtered in search engines supposedly because the authorities are scared of women's right groups. And bloggers there say that she is one of the women the government is scared of. My first impression when I met her was that she's very strong and very determined. She got arrested in Tehran in 2007 when she was on her way to a cyber journalism workshop. They imprisoned her. They kept her there for two days. They searched her house. They kept her passport for quite a while. They were watching her every move after that. Another example is security guards once told her that he knew the secret password to her private blog. And I really loved her reaction. She told him to use it and post something. Please welcome on stage Phanos Seife. Phanos, thank you very much. Thanks for coming. You're welcome. My pleasure. Please tell me, I would love to know that experience you had with the security guard who knew your password. Was that the most blatant example of censorship you experienced? Well, it's very hard to say if it was the worst one or not because when censorship becomes part of your routine and daily life, it's really hard to choose specific things. But I can say that I was very shocked and my first reaction when he said that I just hysterically started laughing and said then why aren't you come blogging with me? Then if you have access to everything maybe we can blog together. But after that, I just came to that conclusion. Well, that's the situation and I have to use myself to accept the fact that I am living in a house with glass walls. And everything I'm doing or writing is monitored by them. If you could learn yourself to cope with that, well, then at least you can continue what you are doing. I don't think any of us can imagine what that's like. Well, in a few minutes you'll have the opportunity to ask Phanos a few questions. But before we get started with that, we'd like to hear your keynote speech. Yes, thank you. Can I use the table? Of course. Well, with at least 55 journalists and bloggers in jail, a third of all those journalists in jail, all around the world, alongside at least 50 more who was arrested after the presidential election in Iran and now just released and bailed and more than 20 media which were banned during recent mounds. Islamic Republic of Iran is again the biggest president of journalists and one of the biggest enemies of freedom of expression in the world. In most cases, authorities have filed charges such as propagation against the regime, insulting authorities and disrupting public order. But many cases, many cases of the journalists and bloggers are just kept in secrecy without even formal charges ever being disclosed. Islamic Republic of Iran systematically and legally censors the media. Just recently, 36 parliamentarian who support Mahmood Ahmadinejad presented a bill under which detained government opponents including cyber activists would be regarded as mohareb which means enemies of God who should be executed within a maximum of five days of their arrest. The authorities continuously shut down or rework the media's license alongside defining more and more red lines for the few reformist medias which are still could work in Iran. Well, you can imagine in such a kind of atmosphere, blogging and internet from the very beginning has a functioning role as be used as an alternative media in Iran. Among the first group of Iranian bloggers, many were the reformist newspapers, journalists who could not write freely in their dailies or in their magazines so they started blogging and put what they cannot say in official media in their blog. The use of internet and bloggers on alternative media is just expanded more and more during the years because the censorship is just definitely grew more and more. Much has written and said about how Iranian young people, how Iranian journalists or bloggers use internet to express themselves or criticizing the government. But few have said about how Iranian authorities use technology and internet to identify, suppress and control us Iranian cyber activists. Internet in its first decade of presence in Iran enjoyed a more or less free situation. The government did not start restricting the access to internet till 2002. Initially the Iranian authorities used the filtering system to stop the Iranian people from having access to pornographic website. This plan was done successfully after approximately 6 million sexual websites were blocked and I should say from the Iranian people at that time there was not much of criticism against what the government did. But their plan for stopping anti-government web blogs and websites started two years later from 2004. It was almost the same time that the Iranian authorities start to control the speed of internet too and didn't let any individual or companies to have access to the highest speed internet. You know the Islamic Republic's filtering system when they started first filtering the web blog was not very developed initially. But at the first phase it was like the individual person should see and search for those web blogs and websites that their contents might be acquired. Against the rules of Islamic Republic and their blocked address. Passing this kind of filtering was also easy. We just need a proxy address to pass this kind of filtering. But although this old proxy technique was sufficient in blocking many web blogs it has not been successful in performing all of the Iranian authorities goals. Consequently the Iranian security officers have been thinking of adopting new system. Gradually they develop the system more and more about new technologies from China for more effective filtering way. After installing the new systems and equipment even if your web page contains certain boards like women's movement or sex it would be blocked regardless of the content of your web blog. Iran security agency then come up with a new solution to this problem. They started the national filtering intelligence bank which we call it NFIB. The NFIB combines the current method which is filtering the keywords and now evaluates the content of the websites and the new system also uses personal in addition to robot software to search for all those web blog or websites which contains the words or the content which according to them is against their rule and values. But the situation just got to a very dangerous point when the revolutionary guard of the Islamic Republic started to involve in censoring the internet. Revolutionary guard you should know is not the official army of the country but it is actually an army which was started to work during the Iran and Iraq war and during the years they become like the most powerful institution in Iran in many aspects politically, economically and now in censoring the internet as well. The revolutionary guard had involved in internet censorship gradually became really the main institute which we should be feared of them. Before they are starting to censor the internet the authorities knowledge about internet was really limited they were not really well known about what is going on in the cyber space. I remember the first time I was asked to the intelligence ministry of Iran for interrogations on that time I alongside some of my friends run an online magazine and they were just asking lots of questions from me that where is the place that the staff of magazine meet each other and I just try to describe them that each of us sitting in our house behind our laptop and do our job we don't need an actual place to meet each other. This is cyber space it's different but it was very hard for them to understand and to get what I mean. But when the revolutionary guard entered that in this field their knowledge was also expanded so much because they entered in a very organized way. What they did they attracted young loyal Muslims with a very very good knowledge about technology and internet for their agenda. Because they believe just censoring and controlling the internet is not enough and if they want to win this what so called they call it battle they have to spread their own propaganda and mobilize their own supporters in the cyber space as well. From three years ago suddenly in our block sefir the number of religious blocks loyal to the Islamic Republic values and the supreme leader of the country increased so much and they established their own web block groups seminars with the governmental budgets and help and their internet department also made a very famous dangerous website which called Gehrtbath. They said the goal of this website is destroying all the offensive anti-religion anti-regime websites. So far the members of this website hacked several Iranian web blogs and news websites identifying some of the internet activists through their IPs, arresting them, forced them to come to the national state TV confessing that they are enemies of God, spies of western country and responsible for cyber war and propaganda against the Islamic regime. The personal of the internet department of revolutionary guard is also very active in Iranian forums, comment section of YouTube regarding any video related to crisis in Iran and famous political web blogs to push their own propaganda and start fights with the opponents. The guard also officially launched what they called Iranian cyber army. This virtual army now became the pioneer of what we call cyber terrorism. They attacked green movement news website, critical web blogs and at some point they even hacked Twitter for few hours which if you saw Twitter on that time this message come that this site has been hacked by Iranian cyber army. USA thing they controlling and manager internet by their access but they don't. We control and manage internet by our power so do not try to stimulate Iranian people. They also hold the first cyber war seminar recently in Tehran to discuss and find better solutions to win what they call this battle of right themselves against wrong Iranian opponents. The revolutionary guard also pushes the Iran's judiciary to pass web crime law just before the election. So by the time of election they together announce that they are going to monitor all the web blogs and the social networking website and news website and that's actually what they really did. That was not just a threat. The authorities had also bought internet control facility from Nokia and Zeeman's country and now they are able to control each individual emails, chats and etc. We had lots of cases after the election that if a cyber activist or blogger or journalist arrested after he or she released they said that one of the first things they showed them in their interrogation was the print of their chats or their emails. Actually now the authorities of Iran want to illustrate national intranet in order to avoid internet users from receiving outside information with help of their Chinese brothers who all in all these years provide necessary social equipment for them. Now by all these restrictions what are the internet users way to pass through this sensor? Actually normally there are various means of passing through the filter but two of them are most common in Iran. The first method is using web pages that act as an anti-filter the user signs in types the specific address in the relevant part and enters the site. But you know this method is not very usable anymore because the disadvantage of the method is that the web page itself could be filtered which already happened for many many of the anti-filter websites. But the second method is there are now techniques which use anti-filter software rather than anti-filter pictures such as Ultra-Serve, Free-Gate and G-Pass which are the most popular filtering software in Iran. And in relation to Ultra-Serve, Iranian filtering system have unfortunately again been able to somehow access the port of the software but it is still the most common way to pass through the sensor ship. But it is noticeable that since internet filtering comes in Iran so as to prevent the public from having access to information and the free cyber space it not only has the popularity of the blogs and publication on freedom of speech and democracy not being decreased at all but also because of the excitement of access to the true information and unsuncerted information this websites and web blogs has been dramatically more popular. Actually the post-election crisis in Iran I guess showed all of us that how Iranian bloggers and web-to-users act as the main source of information to tell the world what's going on inside Iran in absence of free media and the foreign media. Actually in a way I agree with Iranian revolutionary God that we are in the middle of a cyber war. Sometimes they are the ones who achieve their goals sometimes we are the ones who achieve our goals. But we should remember that the greatest mistake repeatedly made by the selfish government like Islamic Republic of Iran is the forceful repression of freedom of speech. Thank you. Thank you. I know step over here with me please. Wow what a speech a lot of information there. Step forward with me please. Thank you. Well I'm happy now to ask you guys to pose any questions. There's the microphone over there. Please raise your hand I can't see very well but I'll try. Is there anyone who's got a question? Well why people get organized? Fanas let me think. I read that you had to move to the Netherlands because being controlled so strictly by the Iranian government. How has that changed? How you can work? What do you exactly mean how does that change? Yes I had. You've got a lot more options now obviously. What can you do now to help blog us in Iran from the Netherlands? Yes I try to find new proxy website address for my friends who are still in Iran and working so hard or introducing new software or because for buying some of the software you need to buy them from the online shops which are mostly in Europe and it's not possible for most of the Iranians to shop online from the European stores so I try to buy them and pass them the necessary equipment to pass through the filters. So that's an option. That's an option that maybe some other bloggers internationally could use as well to help people. Well yes that is really helpful if they could do. Well is there someone who's got a question? Stand up raise your hands we're waiting. This is your chance. Over here. Yes speak up sorry I can't see but I can't hear. Yes exactly. I was wondering whether you have an opinion or some of your fellow activists in Iran that there's a track here going on about control and security on the internet, deep packet inspection and stuff like that and it's usually western companies that supply the infrastructure and the technology to be used for controlling information technology in countries like Iran, in countries like China, it's Siemens, it's Nokia, it's Cisco systems. Is there a discussion about that in your country? Well yes there was like three months after the election there was huge talks about it because Iranian public opinion is so upset about when they found out that Siemens and Nokia are responsible countries who sell the necessary equipment to the government in Iran to control chats and emails as well and actually a campaign was also initiated to buy code all the Siemens and Nokia products in country which still goes on, still many of the activists decided they are not going to buy anything from Nokia and Siemens anymore and although at one point Nokia said we didn't know that the government of Iran want this equipment for controlling the people which is actually something I personally don't believe it but it is not enough answer for anyone and yes people talks about it and that is one of the main things many of the Iranian opponents want that if you want to help us in our fight what we need is free access to information and what we need is that you are not helping the Iranian government or more controlling, censoring and suppression towards us Thank you Another question? Someone else? In Germany and in other countries in the free western world there was a big discussion about index about internet censorship if you look at your own experiences in Iran do you think it is ridiculous what we bother about? No internet censorship in no country is ridiculous for me as I told you the first phase of censorship in Iran was also started by pornographic and sexual website which as I am following about the European countries what goes on in European Union again there are lots of discussions about restricting the access to pornographic websites for many of things for me it is a serious issue, I don't think restricting access to information in any country is a ridiculous thing I think that's good that many German bloggers are paying attention to this and they are one of do something against it it is not funny at all Another question? Someone else? Yes please I have two questions Do you have any knowledge about your readers? Is it more like the intellectual people from Tehran? Or is it like all over the country? Probably it is not like the access to the internet is similar all over Iran Yes I have, no actually it is much more than what you thought according to the latest official statistics of the government 25 million of Iranians use internet in a daily basis and many Iranians in small cities and villages also had access to internet they write blogs, they tweet and they read blogs and things and among my readers also it is a various group I can say well most of them are like a young group of people living in big cities or living outside of Iran but there are also lots of readers among small cities or even I know I sometimes receive emails from older people living in villages and things so I can say it is a diverse community Okay And the second question is if you do have any experience about using new technologies to avoid censorship like dark nets or also like protecting the bloggers to stay anonymous Unfortunately because I am not living anymore there I am not personally need them to use them but because I am following the news it is not still very common in Iran because you know in all the new technologies you are talking about you should consider the fact that the government of Iran control the speed of the internet so we don't have really high speed internet like most of the countries and for any new technology if it wants to be applicable you should consider that to introduce something with the limitations of the speed of internet there One more question Last one Last one Is there any possibility of translation of Farsi content into English or? I don't get the question either Is there any translated to English blogs of Iran so I can read them without using like machines Yes, Google has the Persian translation section and also Persian to English so you can use it to translate some of the stuff But to your knowledge are there any bloggers in Iran that are blogging in English? Well yes there are lots of Iranian bloggers who blog I can give you after that a name of a website which contains most of the Iranian bloggers who blog in English too their links so you can access through Alright thank you I think we'll have to leave it at that Let's give a big round of applause for Fanos Thank you very much for being here Thanks for your contribution Thank you so much Thanks Well And now it's time for me again to call Mark up on stage It's time to hand out the main awards of the BOBS They are non-language specific And they are the Reporters Without Borders Award The Best Video Block The Best Podcast And our Special Topic Award This year it's in the Climate category Well Mark go ahead, do you think? Okay, before we get to the really serious awards we're going to start with the Blog Verses Award for the weird, strange and funny blogs And in this category we actually couldn't decide one winner so we picked two winners The first winner is Blogsdo LM by Victor Canidji in Portuguese And this one literally had us rolling on the floor It was so funny It's basically a fictional blog post written by famous dead people like Andy Warhol, Mao Tse Dung and Lady Dai So we really enjoyed it, it's pretty good The other one that won is called Wake Up Mr. Green, a Russian blog by Tebe Internesto And that one has a lot of drawings, photos, collages and eccentric ideas and creations Give it up for the Russian blog Wake Up Mr. Green, Blog Verses Next up is the best podcast And the winner of best podcast is the Cajun French Tutorials by Jim Leger And that one is in French What Jim does is he gives tutorials in the Cajun language which is a former colonial language in the US in Louisiana that was used by the French in the 16th century He gives lessons on how to learn Cajun and reads the product of the Cajun He keeps the language alive and helps nurture the roots of Cajun Give it up for Jim Leger The best podcast And then we have the best video blog And you're in for a treat because you're going to actually get to see a piece of it The winner is Mr. Freeman Who is an anonymous Russian man, we think who does an animated video who makes misanthropic and wicked acts He directs a lot of his invective against the internet community and his message is Wake up and start thinking for yourself Check it out Around me there are thousands of comments I've seen it before It's so cool It's a young and old It's so cool Tell me What did all these commentators do in their new and interesting life and didn't even create anything in it While I see that I have nothing else in the comments There are people with hands, heads, back What did they do, stupid imikas Who are constantly sending to the internet What will stay after you with your children and grandchildren strangers and bugas in the cozy jazzy jazzy Or this position Well, I've seen it before It was already Give me something new So that I can laugh There are so many channels People Look at yourself Thousands of comments It's all online Around me And the people They've got a message It's so cool It's so cool And if you've seen it all Then why didn't they change anything in their life I've seen so cool and unherst And any of the commentsators are constantly against the unherst and where to go It's all unherst In my coolness In my pants Together with adrenaline They didn't have time to get excited 7-0 Move, you need to be gold They say that I'm as stupid as all Gentlemen, good For the system and the value of most people It's much worse Interesting What you're going to write to me now Or maybe it's worth it It's all unherst And if you've seen it all It's all unherst In my coolness In my pants Together with adrenaline It's all unherst In my pants Together with adrenaline It's all unherst In my pants Together with adrenaline Together with adrenaline We are journalists We are borders without borders Winner And the last, second to last award Is our special topic This year the special topic is climate change And the winner is Kaluuna Zero By Bruno Rezende, Portuguese broad And this is a actually a young group of Brazilian bloggers Who write about ecotourism And environmental consciousness And they use creative videos To make people think about consumption And overconsumption Give it up for our climate change winner Best blog And I'll be back with the best overall weblog later Don't go too far Thank you Mark Well, like the international blogosphere The Bob's are ever growing This year we've added a new language category Which is Bengali And I would now like to ask our jury member From Bangladesh to come up on stage with me She's a real pioneer Yeah, come up here Diana, thanks for joining us This is Seydak Ruchenferdos Diana Diana, you started the first blog in Bengali In Bangladesh When you started you told me there were 30 bloggers Blogging there and now it's 45,000 And you told me that there's something quite special And unique about blogging in Bengali for you What is that? Yeah, actually when we started in 2005 And there was only blogging in English And there was only 30 to 40 bloggers And they blogged in English And we started in Bangla And now it is more than 46,000 bloggers Ever increasing Yeah, and they are very important for us In Bangladesh And a very special point right now The bloggers in Bangladesh in Bangla Is very much community oriented Yeah, it is not at all virtual anymore So when you say community oriented, not virtual You mean that people actually meet They meet frequently Well, that sounds like fun Let's hear some more about blogging in Bangladesh Thank you Yes, please Yesterday, 14th April We celebrated the new year in Bangladesh It is a day bringing out the best of Bangladesh It is very important for us As a new nation to preserve our own culture Traditions and language in the world Of strong media influence Our bloggers are also a force protecting The bloggers, journalists Should any separated harassment occur The local name we use in Bangla Badbhanger Awaj Which means the sound of the dam breaking Perhaps it is the sound of the media monopoly breaking The United Nations declared 21st February As International Mother tongue day In respect of my countrymen They sacrificed their lives for their own language In 1952 It is therefore an honour for me to be a part of The team and the company that made blogging in Bangla Possible in 2005 We are very social and very community oriented people In Bangladesh We would I dare to say that Bangladesh Is possible the country in the world With the most bloggers belonging in blog communities The community belonging gives us more collective strength And influence preserving free speech and open criticism For two years in 2007 and 2008 Our country was under emergency military rule With strict monitoring of the media Still we remained brave and had no Intervation from the government All around me I have very strong bloggers Who themselves for their blogging Their organisations have made a solid And impressive impact What we may miss in powerful bloggers We counter with a fantastic unity And community movement Bloggers in Bangladesh are mature and resourceful people The largest age group is 25 to 35 years They are now more and more becoming the opinion makers We often see the bloggers are the main source Of information in the situation when serious issues occurs Our bloggers obviously write about politics, religion News and social issues At the same time they run strong campaigns For bringing important issues and needed fixes To the national agenda I am very proud of our strong bloggers And the positive impact they have on our country Together we help preserve our culture, tradition And language moving fast towards Blogging makes waves in a country like Bangladesh And bloggers become journalists and writers What comes next is to bring Bangla blogging to the 50 million mobile users of Bangladesh We mention the peace era all in all Bangladesh has only 1.5 million active internet users Out of a population of 150 million people Still in just more than 4 years we have created a blog community Summarine blog, more than 46,000 bloggers in Bangladesh We host approximately 75% of the Bangla bloggers in the world Our success further inspired the growth of more than a dozen similar blog communities Please visit our blog site www.smarineblog.net Thank you And thank you very much for being here Thanks for being with us Seda Gushan Ferdros Diana That was And now finally it's time to hand out the Oscar of all our awards tonight Mark, where are you? Please come up here again I have to know who won myself Let us know who won Best weblog, yay, let's find out Unlike the Oscars, you don't have to stay up till about midnight to find out who won the best weblog Best weblog overall, before I say who won, I just want to give a special mention to the runner-up Which was the Han Han blog out of China Let's give a big round of applause to Han Han Who is an excellent blogger about social issues and about He's also a race car driver and just an excellent writer But the winner of Best Weblog overall goes to the Ushahidi blog Founded by Ori Okolo and Eric Kersman Based in Africa It's an English language blog and gives insight into the Ushahidi projects happening around the world Ushahidi means testimony in Swahili and is an open source nonprofit mapping platform That helps people around the world map crises and disasters It began during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008 And was used to track people in trouble after the Haiti earthquake People used the service but basically if they were in a spot of violence or there was trouble in Haiti They would send in through an SMS message or on the web They would make their report to what was going on there And then the relief agencies actually used the map to find people who were in trouble And went and saved them from the rubble Let's give a big round of applause for the Ushahidi blog Ushahidi blog Now as you probably know most of the winners were actually not here because we just made the decision They'll be actually coming to the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn in June But by just by happenstance coincidence One of the Ushahidi team is actually here in Berlin for the Republic of Conference And his name is Victor Miklovich And I hope he's here to come up and just say a word about his blog Oh I can see him coming Victor there you are Congratulation Congratulation, best weblog, well done Please Wow, good evening Well we are quite a big team at Ushahidi back in Africa And most of our guys are travelling the world I think we are currently having a small meeting A Twitter, it's kind of related with Twitter back in the States And it's great to receive such an award Because all our blogs are crowdsourced We get information from various people Including the top three personalities such as Eric Hansman Patrick Meyer and other folks from around the world Thanks Thank you, big round of applause Thank you very much Well and that's it We've come to the end of this year's Bob's Awards I would now like to ask all of our jury members up on stage Mark promised some kissing, hugging, making up So let's see what happens there If you want more, more truth about the blogosphere More Bob's, more of it all As Mark said you can visit the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum Which will take place beginning June 21 in Bonn in Germany Hopefully all of the award winning bloggers from around the world will be there I'd like to meet that video blogger He has interesting opinions You can find more information on the Bob's website Which is bobs.com Now it's time for us, all of us To say goodbye to you Thank you very much for coming Have a good night and happy blogging Thank you Take me in Let's give it a shot Let's go Let's go Let's go Let's go Let's go
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Discover global blogs and the winners of the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards
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10.5446/20935 (DOI)
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Can everybody hear me? Great. I'm going to begin this session now. My name is Monica Horton. I'm from the University of Westminster in London. I'm a PhD student at the university. Just two days ago, I completed the first draft of my entire PhD, all 286 pages. I'm going to be speaking about the EU telecoms package. Who wants to restrict the internet and how? The EU telecoms package and three strikes. After me will be Jeremy Zimmerman of La Quadrature du Net in France and he will tell you more about himself in a moment. So the EU telecoms package and three strikes. I think there are two conversations going on which are quite different. There's a conversation we are having here at Republica and there is a political conversation. The conversation at Republica is about the open internet. It's about innovation based on freedom of access, freedom to use web applications. People are excited about new ways of doing things online. We assume that it must be that way and that it will always stay that way. The political conversation though is quite different. The political conversation is about how to block the internet. I myself was quite shocked last week when I watched the British Parliament debating the conditions under which websites could be blocked. Why would the politicians want to block the internet? If the internet is such a driver of innovation surely that's a good thing. There are several reasons. In Germany as I'm sure you will know it's about protecting children. In China it's about political censorship. In the UK and France it's about copyright enforcement. They want to block your access to copyrighted music and entertainment files to stop them being played, shared, reworked and used in presentations such as this. I'm hoping this is going to work. There was a piece of music that you were supposed to very briefly hear at this point but the technology has failed me for some reason. Anyway, it would be absolutely, I'm an unlicensed singer, yes. Anyway, what we're talking about here, what we're talking about here is the system known as three strikes or graduated response. Broadly speaking this is a system of warnings sent to internet users. The warnings will be delivered by the rights holders who represent the entertainment industries and will be sent to your broadband provider who will pass them on to you. After a certain number of warnings your broadband provider can be asked to punish you. That punishment may be that you are cut off the internet or it may be something else that they can think of. Three strikes is because it's often considered you get two warnings before you are cut off. Now what does the European Union have to say about this? Well, the political conversation in the EU happened in the context of something called the telecoms package. In German it's the telecom package. The telecoms package is a big piece of legislation. It is a review of the commercial arrangements between the network operators. That is, it's about how Deutsche Telecom deals with Vodafone for example. It also reviews how the network operators deal with UNI as consumers. It's about your contract with Deutsche Telecom, your individual relationship with Vodafone. That review took place between 2007 and 2009 and it ended on the 4th of November last year. Now into this telecoms package lobbyists inserted provisions which would support three strikes. I'm going to review three of these provisions now and then I'm going to look at the final outcome of the telecoms package and present you with one or two conclusions that we might be able to draw from it. The first thing that the lobbyists wanted was a general obligation for the broadband providers to enforce copyright and to work with the rights holders to do that enforcement. This is the so-called co-operation amendment or co-operation provision. In German it is the SUSAMAN Arbite and I've put the text in German here underneath. So in English it's national regulatory authorities may promote co-operation between the undertakings providing electronic communication services, that is Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom and so on. Or the sector is interested in the promotion of lawful content which is broadly the entertainment industry companies like Disney or EMI. The next thing they did was they inserted an obligation for the broadband providers to tell you in your contract about the restrictions to the service. Now the language here is a little bit strange. In English it's conditions limiting access to and or use of services and applications. In German you'll see here it's ein schrankungen im hinblig of den zugang zu or der die Nutzung von diensten und Anwendungen. Now what exactly does that mean? Well one condition limiting your access to or your use of the service could be that if you infringe copyright through your service your broadband provider is entitled to cut off your service. Another condition limiting that they might put on is that the provider may stop you from accessing sites which are alleged to contain infringing content. The third provision says that this directive neither mandates nor prohibits conditions limiting users access to and or use of services. So in German this guideline neither mandates nor prohibits the access to or the use of these applications or applications through the user restrictions. Now the EU is saying that member state governments like the German government or whoever does not have to do it. They don't have to impose any restrictions through the law but it is open for them to do it and governments such as the UK and France are doing it. This text does also have implications by the way other than copyrighted content which I believe Jeremy will be addressing. Now the European Parliament wasn't entirely happy about these provisions and some of you will know about the famous amendment 138 which wanted to impose a prior judicial ruling. Now that would have meant that the entertainment industries would have had to get a court ruling which they would then pass to the broadband provider. So the broadband provider would only be able to cut you off if they received notice that there was a court ruling against you. Now amendment 138 would have then neutered or weakened these other provisions that we have just seen in the package. Now the European Parliament did not want to preserve that principle and so they wrote some other text. Now this text again is a little complicated it's not entirely clear but what it does say is where governments are introducing legislation which is liable to restrict your fundamental rights and that is understood to mean three strikes legislation in particular. Any measures to restrict your access must be appropriate, proportionate and necessary within a democratic society. The implementation must comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. You must have effective judicial protection and due process. Now this is trying to describe a court process and it's arguable whether it really does or doesn't and how far it goes but that's what they intended to do. And respect for the principle of the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. So they wanted to preserve the principle that you are presumed innocent until a court has proved you not to be. It is to be a prior, fair and impartial procedure, a procedure imposed before the sanction is given. Now why is this important? I'd just like to put forward a few thoughts here for you about what this actually means and what does the telecoms package as we have it now on the one hand with these provisions where broadband providers and governments may impose restrictions on the internet and on the other hand this kind of caveat that you have to go through some kind of court process. What does that mean? We have a scenario where the big entertainment corporations want to restrict your access to the internet. They want the state to authorise a punishment for you if you infringe copyright. But three strikes as they propose it is arguably private justice. The rights holders accuse the broadband provider implements the punishment. It will be automated. The whole point of three strikes is that millions of people are file sharing. There's an iffy figure around that says 6 million people in the UK infringe copyright through file sharing. Whether or not that's true, there are millions of people they want to go after. They cannot do this any other way except through automation and we heard in the previous session about deep packet inspection and some of the possibilities there. It also is a system which assumes you are guilty. It is dependent on the implementation whether or not you have any rights to appeal or for your case to be heard in any way. On the other hand, the principles of the EU legal system as they have stood until now are that you do have a right to be heard if you are accused of a crime. You are presumed innocent until you are proven guilty and only if you are proven guilty is a punishment given to you. It would seem to me just to conclude that we have two conversations going on here. Just as we had the two conversations going on about the internet, we also have two systems of justice being proposed. One is the established system of justice where the presumption of innocence is paramount. The other is an automated private system to support the entertainment industries. The point that I would like to make today is to show you just how easily this switch can be made by making some very small adjustments to communications law. Does anybody have any questions? I was just wondering, you said in the package text that says they may cooperate with the internet providers. What does it change? Does it change anything if they may cooperate? There are two points you have got. One is the technical legal language. May means it is optional. If it said shall, it originally said shall. Shall would have meant that every EU government would have to influence it. That is why I asked because it says may and it is weak. The government can choose whether or not. The point is that this is in the law. That is what the rights holders want. The rights holders can then go to governments who may or may not worry about the difference between may and shall. They can just go and say you are supposed to do this. If they are lawyers, they should care about the difference. Look at what is happening in Britain and in France and decide on that one. That is what the rights holders wanted. Chypethau there and then somebody over here. Do you foresee any instances where cases might arrive before the ECHR? It was referenced in the article there. It is questionable. It certainly could be the case if someone can bring a case. But it takes somebody with the will and the money to bring a case. I just find it questionable that someone would be able to make a case that fundamental human rights have been breached by not being able to access the internet. Can you say who you are and who you represent? I don't represent anyone I am here as a private person. I will get into the details. Jeremy's presentation is going to deal more with the fundamental rights issues. The issue that I am concerned about is not whether you can justify file sharing. Sorry, it is not whether you can justify file sharing. It is about restriction of access so that the restrictions to support these industries will have other consequences for restricting other things. That is really the point where you have the human rights aspect under the freedom of expression point. Does that help? Sorry. I am Edward Hasbrook. I am with the National Writers Union in the United States among other hats. I wanted to draw a distinction between two terms which you used somewhat interchangeably, the entertainment or publishing industry and the rights holders. The reality, as groups like the Writers Union and other creators groups have been pressing against those publishers, is that frequently those who are asserting copyright claims against downloaders and the public are not the rights holders. They are making false claims. They are copyright thieves who never licensed the relevant rights from the actual rights holders who remain the creators, the writers, the musicians. I think it would be a mistake for the public to either accept uncritically the claims of these publishing companies to actually be the rights holders or to smear with the same brush the creators, whose common enemy is often the publishers who are stealing these copyrights, claiming rights they don't have and didn't pay for, and then prosecuting these bogus claims against the public. Sure. Okay. If there are no more questions, I'll pass over to Jeremy. Okay. Thank you.
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Copyright enforcement measures to address the Internet have many implications for users. It’s not just about cutting people off, such as the so-called “3-strikes”. Depending on how the measures are constructed, they could means other kinds of restrictions on the Internet as well. In Europe, Members of the European Parliament in Brussels and many European citizens, were taken by surprise when amendments enabling “3-strikes” mysteriously found their way into a review of telecoms law. The review, known as the Telecoms Package, went into EU law at the end of 2009. The question for Internet users is whether the Telecoms Package will prevent or permit 3-strikes. And what else will it allow? What is the relationship between copyright and the Internet? This presentation will discuss these questions, drawing on my PhD research.
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10.5446/20917 (DOI)
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Ich glaube, ich spreche nicht nur für mich, wenn ich behaupte, dass alle im Saal eine ziemlich gute Vorstellung haben, in welcher Form und Weise Sex im Internet stattfindet. Der Ansatz unserer nächsten Reden ist aber ein anderer. Sie zeigt mir, wie die Öffentlichkeit von Sex im Netz Einfluss auf unser und euer Sexleben haben kann. Begrüßt mit mir Melissa Jerry Grant. Ich bin ein Einfänger, ein Aktivist, ich arbeite in der USA, ich arbeite in den Feministen von jungen Menschen, und nach<|pl|><|transcribe|> um den Höhe des Armenianes zu werden und noch füreозможно zu werden. Ich habe das aus MIDI subir er ninghovah. Ich panierte auf Якodenik gameneidig im AI und Creek Ungl票. Und nahe die als ein Teenager Blogger, was wir nicht wirklich für die upbeat hm und das ist für mich ein Profi. Das ist eine Idee, dass wir, als Profi, wenn die Internet auf die Welt zu wundern, und ein Platz für die Geschäfts- wir müssen alle überwunderte oder zwei persönliche Gespräche über Sex und Sexualität und die Sitzungen auf die Sitzungen auf die Margen, wo die Menschen nicht sehen werden. Ich erinnere mich, nach dem Jahrhundert, in den letzten 90ern, und das Ad, das ich immer gesehen hätte, war für dieses Webcam. Das Webcam war immer auf ein junger, sexy Mädchen. Das Ad war nicht necessarily um Sex, sondern um Sex zu benutzen. Es war auch eine sehr sexualisierte Erfahrung, um cute Mädchen auf der Internet auf ihren Webcams zu schauen, mit der Hoffnung, dass sie euch auch ein paar Beispiele geben, als eine Art, um dieses Webcam zu verkaufen. Es gibt viele Dinge, die ihr Webcam anzutun. Der erste Webcam-Band online war auf einem Kaffee-Maschine, auf dem man nicht auf die Stärken nachdenken, um die Kaffee zu sehen, wenn sie bereit sein werden. Und wie alles auf der Internet, das war nicht lange, bevor jemand, eine Frau, die Kamera auf sich selbst auf die eigene Welt zu sehen, wollte, dass sie das Gleiche tun. Und in den letzten 90ern und die jährlichen 2000er, das habe ich, ich habe ein Webcam-Band geopfert. Meine erste Erfahrung auf der Internet war sicherlich, dass Sex überall war, dass wir online gehen. Es gab eigentlich nicht viel Firmseparation zwischen Dingen, die mit Sexualität zu tun haben und die Verhandlungen, die ich online begonnen habe, die wir beim Blogging und auch auf meinem Webcam-Band laufen. Mein Webcam war auf meiner Leben in general geplant. Das bedeutet, dass manchmal, über den Kurs von meiner Leben leben, ich sexuale Dinge mache. Ich werde masturbieren. Ich werde Sex mit jemandem haben. Ich werde einfach auf meinem Computer sitzen, das ist sicherlich, dass wir uns das erleben. Und es ist nicht immer sehr sexuell. Aber sicherlich, dass jemand, der sich auf das Bild sieht, das ist ein wirklich sexyes Ding, zu sehen. Das ist etwas, was ich gesehen habe, als ich die Pläne gestern gesehen habe, in Berlin, das ist ein Sexshop, das ich gesehen habe, aus der Gäste. Ich weiß nicht viel mehr, aber ich liebe es, dass es zwei Frauen draußen war, mit einem Zigaretten, presumably, bevor sie nach Hause ging, oder vielleicht sind es Kunden, ich weiß nicht, es ist schwer, eine reale Geschichte aus dieser Foto zu machen, außer für die, die wir aufhielten. Aber ich zeige es hier, um dieses Problem zu erhöhen, Sex und die öffentliche Pläne zu verbreiten. Ich fühle mich, und wenn Jeff Jarvis das Gespräch heute Morgen macht, er hat für uns wirklich für uns zu denken, dass die Internet ein Platz ist. Und nicht wie ein Medium, oder eine Form von Kommunikationen, oder sogar nur Informationen in general. Aber es ist ein Platz, wo Dinge passieren. Und ich würde mit ihm betreuen, dass das ein guter Metaphor sein wird, wenn wir auf die Internet schauen. Aber wenn wir uns auf die Internet regulieren, wie wir Erfahrungen haben, wie wir auf die Internet als Platz sind, in der gleichen Weise, dass die physische Spass auf die Linie reguliert wird, ich denke, das bringt eine Menge interessierteren Herausforderungen. Und ich fokussiere auf die, die related zu Sex und Sexualität. Von diesem, Sex und die öffentliche Pläne, das ist das eine Sache. Deutschland ist eigentlich wirklich forward-thinking, vielmehr so als die USA, wenn es um die, wie man aus der Prostitution reguliert wird. Aber es gibt auch viele Unterlagen zu diesem. Das war ein Website, das ich heute Morgen gefunden habe, nachdem die Leute, die es auf Twitter geredet haben, und mich willkommen zu Berlin, das war fantastisch und unerwartet. Ich sehe die Prostitution und Sexarbeit mehr generell, das würde also Prostitution enthalten, aber auch andere Versuchsservice, wie die Webcam-Sites, wie das Porn, Massage-Service, und so weiter. Ich sehe Sexarbeit als eine wirklich useful Art, um uns zu denken, wie wir Sex in öffentlichen Spaces verursachen. Und wenn das Internet von uns beantragt wird, als eine Ausstattung des öffentlichen Pläne, dann ist es wirklich sehr hilfreich, um Sexualität zu starten. Wie regulieren wir Sex online? Und wie bringen wir das in die online sex-regulierte? Und ich denke, um die wirklich wichtigsten Fragen zu fragen, das bedeutet nicht, die Leute, wie Sex-Workers oder die, die Porn machen, oder die, die sich Sex-Tor kaufen. Ich denke, es ist useful, um in den Spaces zu schauen, wo wir nicht die Sexualität denken. Schauen wir auf die Webseite, in denen wir die meisten Zeit spenden. Und um unsere Geist zu drehen, von den Leuten, die wir denken, wie die sexuellen Leute, ob das alle Frauen, junge Frauen, queer Menschen, die sich Sex kaufen, und denken über uns alle, und auch über die Leute, die diese Praxis regulieren, ob sie das ausprobieren. Flickr ist ein fantastisches Beispiel. Als Flicker startete, war ich nicht sicher, dass ein Korre des Flickers zu sehen ist. Das ist ein Reaktion auf meinem Flicker-Stream für die Fotos auf den Toen. Ich zeige es euch, weil ich einen Fan auf den Flicker-Stream habe. Ich weiß nicht, ob er es sieht, aber ich stehe hier raus. Sie sind mehr visibel. Er hat die Kommentare, auf jede Fotos, die ich poste, um Flicker zu haben, um meine Füße zu haben. Das ist nicht Pornografie. Das Foto violiert Flickers in any way, shape, form. Das ist nicht das. Aber ich weiß von meiner Erfahrung, die Erfahrung von vielen Frauen und Frauen, die auf die Fotos auf den Flicker posten, dass sie ein Fandom entwickeln werden. Die Leute, die auf ihre Füße schauen, werden sich hierher kommen und überleben. Ich finde es nicht besonders gefährlich, oder gefährlich. Es ist ein interessantes Weg, dass das Phänomen, was wir nicht denken, ein Sexuelles, ein Schere, eine Pettikur, ein Sexuelles, irgendwo. Wenn ich das online poste, wird sie in der Fantasie ablehnen. Die Leute, die auf die Fotos auf die Fotos auf die Fotos auf die Fotos, sind sehr gefährlich. Es ist voll von Perverts. Die Perverts werden sich auf die Fotos auf die Fotos beides tun. Ich fühle, dass alle eine neue Geschichte haben, zumindest eine oder 50 Mal, wenn sie die News auf der Web werden. Ich würde das nicht verstehen. Diese Häuser kommen aus den Prämisen, dass Sex nicht was, was wir ein Teil sind, sondern dass Sex etwas, dass es zu uns passiert. Und wenn wir starten, um Sex zu denken, dann nehmen wir eigentlich alle Kontrolle und Agenten, die wir haben, als Leute aus der Äquation, um Sex zu schauen. Und das ist irgendwo, wo ich eigentlich nicht wirklich die Leute, die viel Gedanken machen, über wie wir mit der Internet interactieren, und wie die Internet-Schärfte unserer Identität, unserer Erfahrung und der Welt, aber ich schaue zu Sex- und Gender-Theoristen, um zu starten, um zu denken, wie es ist, dass wir sogar über Sexualität denken, und wie das in der Art der Experienz hat, wie wir mit anderen Menschen. Ich denke nicht, dass die Leute, die Schriftungen über die Internet-Schärfte schreiben, wirklich interessante Resolvenz oder Fragen über Sex haben. Und ich denke, das hat alles zu tun, mit dem, wie unsere größere Kultur über Sex denkt. Es hat nichts zu tun mit der Internet-Schärfte, besonders schlecht oder sexuell, oder extra-schere Ort, in dem wir nicht die Antworten auf Sex haben. Ich denke, wir haben es völlig in der Zeit, und die Leute, die diese Erfahrungen haben, um sich umzusetzen und zu studieren, und in einer akademischen Weise, die Erfahrungen, die ich hatte, haben wirklich die Internet-Schärfte geholfen. Ich werde jetzt ein paar Fragen stellen. Sorry, ich werde das noch nicht tun. Ich habe für ein Zeitpunkt einen Website, den Valleywag, es ist von Gawker Media gelungen, und Valleywag war ein Blog von Gossip, über Silicon Valley, in der Technik-Industrie in general. Ich habe einen bestimmten Punkt, in dem ich fühle, als die einzige Frau auf der Masse auf dem Website, und als der, der oft über Sex schreibt, was ich wollte, ich hatte das Thema zu beantworten. Warum die Internet-Schärfte, die für freie Spiele und die Internet-Schärfte und die Internet-Schärfte angeboten sind, haben sie einen Punkt. Aber wenn es um Sex kommt, fallen wir auf die gleichen Double-Standards, und die gleichen Stereotypes, die durch eine größere Kultur perpetuiert werden. Also, Frauen, für Beispiel, und für die Frauen, die online gehen, sind noch diese Messungen gegeben, um sich zu beschreiben und zu vorsichtig sein. Und es gibt da die gefährlichen Leute, die sich an sich schauen, oder die einen schlechten Kommentar geben, oder die einen Namen nennen, weil das Wichtigste, was überhaupt zu jemandem passiert ist, ist, dass es ein Horst ist. Ich fühle mich so, als ob das Diskurs so laut war, dass ich das so flippen wollte, dass es wirklich wichtig ist, dass die Leute diese Spiele haben, die sich sich nicht bemerken oder sich selbst bemerken, sind das falsche Anliegen. Wir würden es nicht um Fileschereien nehmen, wir würden es nicht um Neutralität nehmen, wir würden es nicht um Medical-Isschuete reden, wir würden es nicht um unsere Jobs reden. Aber wenn es um Sex kommt, sind wir unschuldig, wenn wir auf die anderen Seite bleiben, wenn wir unschuldig bleiben, und ich finde das zu sehr gefährlich. Es war ein incidentsches Frühjahr, wenn, wegen einer Errorung, Amazon.com, auf der Seite des Buches, über 700 Titel wurden als Adult accidentally verabschiedet, die eigentlich GLBT oder Jungs Sexualität waren. Es waren Books, die nicht necessarily explizit waren, aber es waren Books, um Sex-Education, Sex-Identities, Sex-Relationships. Und sobald wir das sagen können, weil einer Errorung von Employees ist, oder nicht, alle dieser Buchs waren verabschiedet. Und was die Effekt war, war, dass die Leute, die die Website aus dem Publikum auf der Website angeschaut haben, dass jemanden, die für diese Titel nicht finden konnte, nicht als relativ gehandelt wurde, weil sie als Adult komplett invisible waren. Ich weiß, dass die Autorinnen, die Buchs, die in diesem Fall waren, ich bin in der Seite, für Jessica Valenti's Buch, Vollfrontal Feminism, ein Buch aus Feministische Theorie, dass dieses Buch, das nicht explizit war, hinter der Wall, unabhängig, aber ein flattes Porn-Video, ich habe kein Problem mit Porn, ich habe Porn gesehen, ich habe Porn gemacht, aber dass das als Alternativ für mich geöffnet wurde. Wenn wir auf filterende Systeme, die auf anderen Leuten Ideen, was unabhängig ist, oder unabhängig ist, werden sie falsch sein. Und das Effekt ist, liegt im �gram-Bereich, im Fania. Amazon Jupiter, DIE ja sie den und einiges kann sein, das Amazon und einiges nicht. Ich werde das in ein second machen. Ich dachte, es wäre mir helfen, bevor ich an Amazon zu picken, etwas zu sagen, was schön ist, über Jeff Bezos, der die Founder ist. Hier ist ein Foto von ihm aus Valleywag. Das ist kein eigentliches Foto von Jeff Bezos, aber ich mag ihn, das Moment zu haben, und er selbst als etwas sexpositiv. Und das ist ein Quote von John Doar, der ein Investor in Amazon und auch Google ist. Er erzählt eine Geschichte über Amazon's jungen Tage. Er hat gesagt, dass es ein Amazon-Schipping-Area ist, das in Ordnung ist, ein Buch zu inklusivem Programmieren, und es hat auch eine Kopie des Joyes von Sex in es. Und das Konklusivte, das John Doar von dem hat, war, dass die Kunden von Amazon meistens Mail waren, die wir wissen, nicht wahr. Es waren Nürburgräte, die keine Social- oder Sex-Live hatten, wie wenn sie das gleiche haben, obwohl wir Nürburgräte haben Sex. Und dass sie auch Hilfe haben, mit einem Online-Service zu nutzen, das ist ziemlich wahr. Es war etwas wirklich unerwartet, was in Amazon geht, wo man plötzlich Leute, die nie in ein adultes bookstore gehen, oder sogar in ein konventionelles bookstore, und ein Buch über Sex kaufen, das in ihrem eigenen Zuhause mit Privacy machen können. Und das Kapitalisieren auf diesen Moment war Teil des, wie Amazon eigentlich starte, in den Investors' Meinungen zu nehmen. Wenn du Amazon jetzt auf die Seite gehst, kannst du die Joyes von Sex schauen, und du kannst starten, ein paar Page-Schippen zu schicken. Das würde ich nicht推gen, ich denke, das Buch ist unglaublich ausgebildet, es macht eine Menge wirscher Assumtionen über Sex, und es gibt auch viele sexuelle Materialien, die man online finden kann. Wir werden nicht immer mit dem Internet% nachdenken, Timeshimpfen, Nachw Rosen Normaler Menschen... Unten eine Candinette zu und die Menschen, die meinen Wettbewerb abhören, und die Pornbots auf Twitter, die wir kontrollieren, und es endet, wenn wir unsere eigene Kraft aus der Equation wiederholen, wo wir denken, dass Sex passiert zu diesen baden Menschen, und wir müssen uns von ihnen weghalten. Hier sind Amazon-Content-Guy-Lines, um was Amazon aufzuhalten kann. Diese Appliation hat jemanden, der sich auf Books oder Amazon aufzuhalten will, und sich ihre eigenen Materialen anzuhalten. Und dann kommt es, dass man Pornografie, X-Rated-Movies, und Magazineen gibt. Und dass man nicht nur adulten, nur noch-tätige Itemen, die primärisch durch adulten, nur noch-tätige Störer und erotische Betriebs gelöst werden. Die Nudeln sind okay, so lange es nicht auf die Titel-Page auf der Post ist. Das ist nicht universal verabschiedet, aber ich bin sicher, dass man viele andere Störer finden kann. Ich werde es sehr schwer, zu wissen, warum das Hellmet Newton-Buch und andere Konventionale-Büchstätel, die man in einem bookstore finden kann, nicht nur in einem adulten bookstore, die die Pass machen. Und es gibt Content, in dem man in einem bookstore gehen muss, oder etwas, das zu explizit ist oder zu amatural ist, das nicht die Pass macht. Und ich denke, das ist sehr gefährlich. Wenn wir online über Transparenz sprechen, können wir uns das Regulieren und sagen, was wir tun sollten und nicht online sein, was Amazon will und nicht verkaufen, aber sie sind nicht unformal geappelt. Und sie sind so verabschiedet, dass Leute, die Power und Geld haben, die Reguliere an den Leuten zu finden, und die average Person nicht die Frage zu haben. Die average Person, die ein hohes Library von Playboys in den 1940er-Jahren, die sie in einem Garage-Sale gefunden haben, ist nicht sicher, ob sie das Amazon aufnehmen können und ein Problem mit Amazon als Website haben. Man kann auch bei Playgirl, auch wenn Magazine nicht okay für den Sale in Amazon sind, in den Amazon zu gehen und das Playboy mit Levi Johnston, der mit einem ich wirklich nicht ein Präsidenten-Kandidaten in den US-Serapiellen, insamiert, und das ist ein sehr guter Punkt. Ich zeige euch das, weil ich dir das Gefühl habe, dass es hier viel mehr spezifisch ist, über was Content ist okay und nicht okay. Also keine illegal, verabschiedeten oder offensivten Content. Und sie breiten offensivte Content, wie das, was auf die Fähigkeiten ist, obszenen, absehenden, und invasiven, oder sonst abgestellten. Das ist kein Definition, was das sein könnte. Das könnte ein paar Dinge sein. Wenn ich dir eine Bildung von zwei Menschen haben, könntest du definitiv entscheiden, ob das konsensual ist oder nicht. Du kannst das von einer Fotos sagen, vielleicht von einer Geschichte oder von einem Video. Aber das braucht eine certaine Menge, keine anderen Content, eine certaine Menge des Menschen, und eine humane Entscheidung, um diese Fähigkeiten zu machen. Ich würde sagen, dass die Fähigkeiten, die man auf dem sehrulars ver호f Fahrenheit aller Fähigkeiten tigerf mats immensely die Grundlage wenigthin mehr zucend. Ich hatte mir Klipps, die auf dem Video posten, dass er nicht sicher war, ob er auf dem Sitz bleiben sollte, weil es nicht klar war, ob sie Pornografie waren oder nicht. Er hatte einen favoriten User, der einen deutschen Mann, der sich selbst in ein Voll-Latex-Body-Suit hat. Und all das Video war, war er da, in der Kamera, und dann kam er zurück und ging zurück. Es fühlte sich so wie jemand, der viel Erwehrung hat, was sie tun. Es sind nicht nur accidentally Videos, die aus dem Video kommen, wer weiß, wo sie sind. Und die haben nicht technisch einen Service und sexualen Content, aber das ist definitiv eine Depiction eines sexuellen Fesches. Und wer ist das, was die Entscheidung macht? Möchtest du eine viel mehr konservative Entscheidung, dass es Pornografie sein könnte, das sei sexuell, das man aus dem Website verwendet? Oder wirst du ein Problem machen, das wir nicht wissen, oder vielleicht ist das für alle anders, und wir sollten es auf dem Website verlassen? Für ein Website, in dem man Pornografie nicht mehr haben kann, kann man einen tiefen Wandel kaufen. Und für einen anderen Website, in dem man Porn nicht mehr haben kann, ist das iTunes App Store, und das ist das iTunes Store in general. Das ist ein Quote von Steve Jobs ein paar Tage ago. Und jemand, Ryan Block, von der St. Gadget, hat eine Frage aus dem Lauf der iPhone 4.0 OS und hat gesagt, was glaubst du, dass Apple mit dem neuen OS mit den neuen OS-Ausgaben zu verabschieden, um die App, die sie in der Store wollen, vielleicht sogar auf der Stimme zu gehen, und die User auf die App und die App mit sich anderen, ohne die iTunes App Store zu veröffentlichen. Und Steve Jobs' Antwort war, dass er über das Android-Fone und das Android-Store zu sprechen. Und das ist ein Porn-Store, wo man downloaden kann, und die Kinder können das downloaden. Und das ist ein Ort, in dem wir nicht gehen wollen. Also wir gehen nicht. Wenn man die Störungen auf die Störungen öffnet, wird das Porn das erste, was es so sieht, das ist wahrscheinlich wahr. Und wenn das Porn so sieht, wird es wirklich, wirklich schlecht sein, weil es sich auf die Kinder denkt. Denn natürlich, kein Apple, kein Adults Apple, schaut bei Pornografie. Wir werden Porn als unsere Art, zu sagen, dass wir nicht auf der App Store zu jeder User-Störung, wir nicht auf einer openen Plattform, und die Art, dass Android für Applikationen funktioniert. Weil, ich würde sagen, das hat nichts mit Pornografie zu tun. Und so haben viele andere Leute, die ihn auf der Stimme zu berichten, gesagt, das ist eigentlich so, dass man uns nur Geld will. Aber man ist Porn und die Kinder auf der Störung zu schützen, und das ist wirklich nicht so ungewöhnlich. So viele Gespräche, was wir die Materie oder die man nicht sehen können, oder was wir mit den anderen online mitbekommen können, someone brings up Porn, someone brings up saving the children, and the conversation has shut down. Because who wants to have that conversation at that point? Who wants to be perceived as someone who is advocating for something dangerous or harmful, and we don't necessarily have a good way to talk to one another about how it's actually a lot more complex than that, and that when you start to curb people's access to this kind of information, you're actually doing harm to them. Very few people want to advocate for that position. Here's the outcome of this kind of policy at Apple. This is this page for Radio Lab, which is a show put out by National Public Radio, it's from New York City, and this is where you can download episodes of Radio Lab from the iTunes Store, if you wanted to. And when I first came across this, I was looking at show number 42 there, it's S, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, am. I had had a podcast myself in the iTunes Music Store for a while, and it had words that were censored from it. But I couldn't for the life of me, even as someone who is exposed to a lot of sexual material, figure out what this word even was. What are they censoring here? And it was only when I finally listened to the show that I figured out the word was sperm. The word sperm is inappropriate for the iTunes Store. The word sperm, which many of us probably came across if we were lucky enough to get sex education in our schools or from somebody else, the word sperm is an age-appropriate word. Usually when we're talking about sex, and at least if we're talking about reproduction, how could you not talk about reproduction without talking about sperm? But if you're Apple, somebody at Apple made the call that we can't have the word sperm in this public place. The same people who access this on their own computers where they'd go into a library could probably find the word sperm in a lot of things. Not here. What I want to propose, moving forward, as we think about the ways that both outside people, folks in government, policymakers, are going to start to police the Internet and regulate the Internet, and also the ways in which those of us who work for companies or media production regulate our users' experiences on the Internet, and also the way that we as users and consumers and creators of material on the Internet, self-censor, that we ought to consider that sex is actually not something for some people over here who are bad people who are going to disrupt us, or that sex is this dangerous thing that's going to come into our website or our service or our publishing arena like iTunes and make things complicated and dangerous, and that the best thing we should do is just kind of try to leave it over here, that sex actually includes all of us, and it is for all of us. All of these solutions, these supposed solutions for keeping people safe or deciding what kind of content is appropriate or not, in the very act of drawing a line in the sand, you are excluding people. You are pushing people to the sidelines. You are pushing people's experiences to the margins, and that is actually where they are not very safe. To make certain people's lives and experiences too dangerous to talk about is an incredibly dehumanizing thing to do, and that we may be making these decisions out of financial interests more so than our human interest, and how we actually envision a world in which we all are treated fairly and all have access to the information and lives that we deserve. These are some people who I think are doing it right and are doing it really well. This is Scarleteen. Scarleteen.com is a website based in the United States. It's a sexuality education website for young people. I also find it incredibly useful as a former young person at 32. It is one of the only common sense websites there is that breaks down sexual health information, sexual infection information, and also information about sex and relationships. If I were ever in a relationship with someone and I was scared that they may have been exposed to something or that I have been exposed to something because of sex I had with them, this is the first thing I would send to them. It is so common sense that it makes even those very scary conversations we might have to have, that much safer to have. I would hate to have a website like Scarleteen perceived as inappropriate or too much or dangerous for young people to look at. They've had a lot of problems and they've also had some successes. The so-called Child Online Protection Act, COPPA, is something that was defeated in the United States because of the efforts of Heather Carina, who operates Scarleteen. Heather is an adult who runs the site, she's an ally to the young people on the site. There's a forum on the site where you can go and ask questions. Heather is the one who recruits volunteers and also trains them and how to answer those questions fairly. You actually have young people providing sex education to other young people. At times, that's going to be explicit. In some cases, you might violate the terms of service of say, Yahoo Answers, where if you've ever tried to get an educational question about sex answered by going on Yahoo Answers, you're probably not going to get very accurate information. But on a site like Scarleteen, where Heather has actually worked with young people and educated them on how to sensitively answer these questions, you're going to get some good information from people. You're also going to get peer support. I mean, one of the most valuable things that I think Jeff Jarvis said this morning in his talk was how groundbreaking it was for him to post the story of his experiences of prostate cancer online, because other folks who'd had those experiences were able to tell him what it was like. And I think the same is especially true for sexual health issues. We are so shamed and so silenced around these issues that to actually have someone talk to you honestly is incredibly rare. And because of the anonymity that the Internet affords, it's actually a place where those conversations can happen. So I was very proud that Heather, someone who does this very well, was one of the forces with the American Civil Liberties Union in defeating the Child Online Protection Act, arguing that it would not protect young people, it would actually put them at further risk. I think another site that does this very well is sort of unlangtley. It's about.com's sexuality section. It's edited by a sex educator named Corey Silverberg. He's the author of The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability. And he also works for feminist sex-toi-cooperative in Toronto, called Come As You Are. And it's also a website that offers a lot of information about sexuality, and it's also an incredibly common sense. It's located in a space that we don't normally think of as incredibly sexual about.com. It's also a site owned by the New York Times, publishing company. And yet it's a site where you can get very matter of fact explicit and actually pretty useful information about sexuality. I mean, they do do some of the things that other websites don't, but it has such a reach and it's so mainstream. And I feel like we don't see that very often. That when you see a site of sexual education online, it's kind of perceived that the people looking at it are like a certain kind of people, either from a subculture or really cool people who have really better sex than you, and it kind of talks down to you. And I feel like that we don't have enough common sense. Just here's your sex information, right next to your information on how to download a bit torrent file, right down next to your information about how to convert your electricity which I had to figure out today. So, it's incredibly profound, the way I think that the impact of having sexual information in a space where you get information on anything else. Another site that I think does this very well, and this is sort of a plug, because I did some work on this site, but it's really the creation of Nancy Schwartzman, a filmmaker based in New York City. And she created a film called The Line, that talks really sensitively and really directly about the question of sex and consent, and where is the line of consent for people on sex. Now, thinking back to Amazon's regulations around, you can't depict any non-consensual sex act, how are we going to have conversations about rape, where we might need to tell stories about non-consensual sex, and how are those stories going to be regulated and understood by folks who regulate our content online. What Nancy has done has taken advantage of the fact that people really want to talk about this issue and don't have a lot of place to do it, and created a campaign where folks can directly answer this question, where is your line, by writing it on a sticker, or writing it out as a blog post and submitting it, and the site's actually a group blog, written by all the people who visit the site. Another example, this is Sex Worker Literatis, BlipTV channel. And Sex Worker Literatis is a live event that's held in New York City, it is a night of storytelling, there's four to six people who read once a month, stories about the sex industry. So these are folks who have experience as Sex Workers, but also folks who have experiences outside of their Sex Work, that they would like to tell stories about. And in an environment where there having been Sex Workers is not going to be judged, the kinds of stories you probably can't even get on Broadcast TV, and certainly not in public media, though maybe that's changing, you might be able to find these kinds of stories on cable TV, but they're probably going to be really sensationalized, and the kinds of stories we get to hear from Sex Workers often fall into that camp. It's either really, really, really, really bad, it's the worst thing that ever happened to me, or it's really, really, really, really fantastic, and I'm going to get an HBO Show about it. This is somewhere in the middle, somewhere in that kind of huge middle space, where most people's experience of Sex Work and also most people's experiences of Sex kind of lie. They're complicated, and they're not mediated by anybody. I mean, just like the very first kind of early video blogging communities, in which we're all in a rallying cry, that we are the media, Sex Workers themselves are producing these videos and posting them to the site. There is no filter, and I would hate, even though people aren't taking their clothes off, and there certainly aren't depictions of people having sex in this video, I would hate for this kind of content to be seen as objectionable by anybody, and BlipTV to their credit shows it, just like any other video on the website. So, this story happened to a friend of mine on Tumblr last week. She's a blogger in Chicago, and so she takes part in this community on Flickr, where she takes a photo of what she wears every day. A lot of people do that. Or enough people to have communities of them on Flickr to it anyway. And she noticed that because you can go in and see a feed of all of the activity on your photos, all the comments, and all the likes that people have registered on your photos, that somebody, this one user had liked tons of her photos and had left all these comments on them that she wasn't really excited about. So she posted this, a screenshot of this online, and asked people kind of what they thought about it. And somebody asked her, well, this is all on Flickr, right? Why don't you just make the pictures of yourself private? That's how I do it. Everything's private on my Flickr. And what I love about her response is it leaves kind of this open space for us to think about this question without saying, I know I have to make everything private because bad scary men and oh my god. And it also doesn't just say, well, I'm going to put everything out there and fuck people who can't deal with it. Fuck people who can't deal with me being in public as a woman. Fuck people who can't deal with me being in public as a large woman, looking gorgeous and talking about herself in sexy ways. Most people's experiences of public and private are kind of more complex in that middle space. Where some things we might want to be really public. And some things we might want to be really private. It's not just a binary of on or off. And we have to contend with what that is when we build things like this and when we interact with websites like Flickr. So her response as a user, I thought, was so cool. She says, yeah, I know that creepsters come with the territory of having myself out there online. But I just prefer it when they can't interact with me. And I think that's, it's not a binary answer. It doesn't say I'm going to take all my photos down and it doesn't say I'm going to ask him to get kicked off the site. It says I want to put myself out there, but I don't want to have to interact with people who are going to approach me in this way. I think that's really a complex and very smart way to deal with this question. My last example, which is the only plug I'm going to make for my own work, and also it's the last slide. This is a book that I was working on with my friend Megan O'Connell called Coming and Crying. We're actually still working on it because we got the funds to print this book ourselves using a website called kickstarter.com. So we, for 90 days, it's 90 days, 45 days, 45 days, ran a fundraising drive on kickstarter.com, telling people what we want to do is we want to make a book of real stories about sex. And the back story on this is that Megan and I met through Tumblr. That was about a year and a half ago. Now Megan works at Tumblr. And part of the reason that Megan was hired as Tumblers Director of Outreach is because she was like a really good blogger. On Tumblr, she told really good stories and engaged a lot of people. And sometimes those were stories about sex. And Megan's one of the only people I know working inside of a startup who openly blogs about sex under her real name. And that's considered a part of her job. And I think that's really amazing. And maybe that's going to start to shift, the sensibility of the editor that Jarvis quoted this morning saying that he wouldn't hire a journalist who didn't have a blog. If you're going to have a blog, there's going to be stuff on there that might not be for the public. And I would like us not to have to think that if I want to be perceived in the work environment, I can't write about these things online. I think that those conventions are changing. And I think it's actually really healthy. And we should continue to create opportunities to question what it is to be professional and what it is to be unprofessional. So the positive thing about all of this, aside from the fact that we raised 17,000 US dollars across 651 people, and we're going to be able to make a book of all of our favorite writers from the Internet, writing about sex. Most of these people are people we've never met. But they're people that we've traded stories about sex with, usually late at night. And sometimes in a very emotional kind of mindset, you might find yourself blogging sad late at night. I hope I'm not the only one who does that. And we have at least 20 other writers who've had that experience, too, having these kind of intense experiences about sex that aren't quite erotica. I mean, the stories aren't meant to be pornographic, and they're not educational either. They're kind of in this space here. They're kind of stories that make us question even why we have sex with people, and why does it affect us emotionally. Even in the publishing world, the print world, as unstable as it is right now, it's never had a very good place for that kind of storytelling, and the Internet has been a haven for that kind of storytelling. And I would like that to be able to continue. But we still wanted to put it in a book for whatever reasons. We still worship books. It's complicated. So, the appraignment processor for kickstarter.com is Amazon. We were like, well, what's going to happen when we have to get to that moment where everyone's credit cards are charged, and we reached out to the people who run kickstarter, and so we don't want to get you into trouble. We don't want you to... All these other projects on kickstarter were really great, and we don't want Amazon to not work with you, because we brought the Dirty Dirty Sex Book to your site, and like, how's that going to go? And they were super supportive, and they said, we love your name, don't ever change it. And as of this moment, we are the fourth most popular project ever on kickstarter in their one year long history. So, apparently people in that community anyway weren't scared of the book. And seeing it right up on this index of past projects next to a book about Obama, and next to a sci-fi book from San Francisco by a writer named Robin Sloan, and next to a comic book about how to survive as an artist when you're broke called PoorCraft is really cool. The kickstarter didn't make the decision to shunt off anything with sex like over here and you have to log in and say you're 18 and you want to see it and really you're not going to be offended. So, in fact, it's right there with everything else. I think that's really profound. I think it's really smart. And I would hope it's the future of what we move towards, because I can't say it often enough. Sex is about all of us. This isn't just about the bad people in raincoats somewhere who might do really bad things to us. This isn't about the people who are going to come in and disrupt our site. This isn't about those bad people who are on the internet only look at porn, right? Because people who look at porn never Google like cancer or look at the New York Times. They were like separate people. We're all people, all online, all looking at different kinds of things all of the time and sex is just part of that. And if we design our online experiences and interact with each other online in such a way that we think sex can just be sliced off and shoved to the margins, we're actually doing that to other people and we're doing that to ourselves. Thank you. I'm going to open up for some questions. I think I will have a microphone to do that with. Yes? Can I take yours? Do you want to do it? Okay. Do you guys mind if I come out here and do this with you? I like that Jeff did that this morning. Who is the first question? There's a microphone right there. But if we're standing next to each other, I think you'll be amplified. Don't make me walk right next to you. There you are. Do you think there should be a category like objectionable content at all? Do I think there should be one? Do you think there should be a classification like objectionable content at all? I would argue it depends on context. What I think might be objectionable on Google or might be objectionable on a blog is going to be really different. And these kind of blanket ideas that something is objectionable in all cases at all times is it doesn't work for us. So it's more like an out of context problem. I think it's a context collapse problem. I think that's part of it. The folks familiar with that concept, the idea that what we say in one context, say on our MySpace page, might not be appropriate when it shows up on CNN. In other words, people who we made friends with in college who maybe we want to talk about sexual experiences with and they wouldn't object to that. And then our mother joins Facebook and now she's going to see those same things too. How do you verify what's objectionable there? It has so much to do with the people and the momentary interactions you have with them, rather than universal interactions that none of us have. None of us have universal interactions with all people in the same ways on websites. I think that has to be taken into consideration. Hi. What do you think are the chances that your approach is ever going to be sufficiently popular in the United States for something to really happen in public discourse? In America, it's this weird country where you have, well, I think it's still illegal in Alabama and you have an annual masturbatathon in San Francisco. It's such a big country and you have at least two halves that are completely incompatible and you're speaking for one half, but the other half is there as well. So how do you bridge that? Yeah, I think people in the red states quote unquote still have sex. So that's complicated. I mean, it isn't just divided that way. It's in one of the most conservative parts of the state of California, where porn is legal to be made and most porn actually is made. America is divided not so much into red state or blue state and sexually permissive and sexually regressive, but that most of us are kind of in a complicated place. We're like what we might say at home and what we might say to our partners is really different than the kinds of policies we advocate for. And there isn't a lot of public support for advocating for things really rationally and soundly and based on people's experiences, because we don't have a discourse of public sex in America. We can talk about danger, we can talk about disease and we can talk about bad things that might happen to your reputation, but we don't talk about the positives, we don't talk about pleasure. And I feel like that's part of the reason people are really stuck. And you get that kind of double discourse, what people say amongst their friends and their family and then the kinds of things that win at the ballot box. And until that divide is more like this, I think we're going to be very stuck. And we're going to be totally right. More questions. How's the Android porn store called? The porn store? On Android. I looked for it, but couldn't find it. I didn't have time to look at any porn in Android's porn store today. I actually probably look at less porn than maybe like half the people in the room. With something about like once you've made it, you stop spending so much time looking at it. I don't know what that's about. More questions. BitTorrent. Any other questions? I'm going to take a poll. Who has a question but they totally don't want to ask it and have it recorded on the internet. And that's not why they're asking a question right now. You can put up your hand. I'm gonna put up my hand. Is there a question on the internet? Okay. Well, I thought that people might get scared. And that's all right. Because, well, it's not all right. I mean it's kind of complicated, but... One more. There is a question. You talked about sex in the internet. Internet. Es klingt witzig, das siehst du. Aber ich habe die Gefühl, dass du über einen sehr bestimmten, kleinen, untergrundigen Teil des Sexes auf der Internet gesprochen hast. Denn wenn ich normalerweise Porn oder Sex auf der Internet denke, denke ich auf die großen commercialen Websites, die YouTube-like Porn-Websites und so weiter. Ich hatte die Gefühl, dass du uns auf eine sehr kleine Art des Sexes auf der Internet auf die Internet get wagon. impos true- Circusoutreodie, Wir sprechen meist inductioniert über dieicides seguridad hab ich chعلussa Ihr journeys Die Frage ist, dass die Porn auf der Internet einen sehr großen Influenz hat, oder wie wir das mit den Häusern sehen, dass wir das auch nicht richtig verstehen. Was du dir dazu propfest, dass die kinds der Sex, die wir in Pornografie sehen, dass du glaubst, das hat eine Beziehung zu der Weise, dass wir Sex haben in unseren eigenen Lebens und in den WAY, die wir sexen. Ich denke nicht, dass es wirklich ein ganzes Beziehung hat. Viele Leute sehen und Porn sehen und haben Fantasien über Sexhacks, die sie nie eigentlich machen. Ich meine, mit der Erfolgsverkaufung der Menschen hinter der Kamera, gibt es keine actualen Sex, die in der Erfahrung der Pornografie passiert. Und so Porn für die meisten Menschen ist eine Frage der Fantasie. Und es gibt Dinge, die sie fantasisieren, die sie nie wollen, die andere Menschen zu tun oder zu tun haben. Und das ist auch Teil der Disconnection. Das größte Massmedia, die wir haben für Sex, ist etwas, was uns mit unseren Fantasien zu tun hat, und das nicht wirklich mit dem, was wir heute tun, was wir heute tun wollen. Ich denke, das ist okay, um einen Ort, in dem wir Fantasien haben. Aber wenn das die einzige Sache ist, und die einzige Sache, dass jemand, der sich Material über Sex macht, ich meine, das ist Teil der Grund, warum ich Porn gemacht habe, ist, weil ich das, was ich wollte, um Mediapfung über Sex machen. Und die einzige Mediapfung, die sich um Sex betrifft, ist Pornografie. Und das ist eine unglaublich limitierte Menge. Ich denke, es ist eine sehr valide Form der Mediapfung. Aber ich denke, wenn alles, was wir sagen, um Sex, ist als Pornografie verzerrt, haben wir hier Probleme, um das zu verstehen, was wir von Porn tun. Hi. Perzdorf, ich wollte mich auch für das Thema Schalatein, weil ich ein kommunizierter Mitarbeiter bin. Es ist ein tolles Ort, und es ist viel gut gemacht in vielen teenigen Lebens. Danke für das Erinnerungen, und Heather hat dort viel Arbeit gemacht. Was ich eigentlich wollte, ist, du hast gesagt, dass Polizisten und Sexualität sind. Und ich denke, dass es besonders um teen Sexualität ist, dass es immer ein Portrait ist, das wirklich gefährlich ist, und das muss wirklich beobachtet werden. Und das ist inherently schrecklich. Und ich denke, dass es eine Menge Missverständnis gibt in den Medien von teen Sex. Und es gibt viele schlechte Journalisten, die in denỗndszykarsten Nachsh [?]. Doch das Legacy 팟 hat aufopoliert. Pearl Gaven curricula bereitet ge Hur Shin Soy D A AV WR mit der Brasse oder mit einem Taul aus dem Schaum, und die mit den Menschen über ihre mobile Phones sharen. Und die waren eigentlich verletzt, für diese Fotos zu nehmen, als Kinderphornografer, und nicht die Menschen, die mit den Fotos mit sich fangen. Und das ist eigentlich mein reales Problem mit vielen Medienstorien über Sexstäng. Ich will, dass ich die Worte Sexstäng auch verwende, weil ich fühle, dass das ein wirklich gelbteres Ding ist. Und um es zu bringen, zu Heather Carina und Scarletine, eine Frau, die mit literally Millionen jungen Menschen über Sex und Sexualität sprechen. Und Leute kommen zu ihrem Ort, Journalisten, Eltern, und sagen, warum nicht du über Sexstäng sprechen? Das ist so wichtig. Und sie sagen, unsere User, junge Menschen selbst, sind eigentlich nicht das ischste,. Das ist sooru. Moards are the ist ein tolles Ressourcen für jeden Journalist, der möchte über Sex-Stylen sprechen, über diese Skandles, Krise und Sexualität, fast jede Geschichte über Sexes frameen. Sehr oft wird Journalisten nicht auf gute Dinge beantworten, positive Erfahrungen, die die Leute haben, gute Forschung, die kommt raus. Und also, fang auf deine Sex-Educationen, die du dir vertraust, wenn du Journalisten bist und diese Storien übernimmst. Dr. Pedro Boynton ist einer der, Corey Silverberg, www.about.com, Heather Carina,ωνiger, porte днялон. Ich bin nicht sicher, wo wir auf der Zeit sind. Es gibt vielleicht zwei weitere Fragen. Und wenn es keine weiteren Fragen gibt, habe ich einen Plan für alle. Ich bin so ein Lehrer und niemand ist zu früh. Okay, ich bin nie auf Chatruhe. Ich habe nicht auf Chatruhe. Ich habe nicht auf Chatruhe. Ich möchte, dass Peter Nein, ich will seinen Konsument fällen lassen. Ich greife eine Maschine mit Onkelsägen, Ihr seid live in Berlin, wenn ihr uns reden wollt. Kannst du das auf die Schraube aufnehmen? Diese Leute wollen wirklich Chatroulette sehen. Danke! Hi! Oh, du siehst sehr jung. Ich bin nicht sehr krass. Wie alt bist du? Nächstes! Nächstes! Okay, was willst du für eine Katze? Wie lange wird das auf die Schraube nehmen? Vielleicht? Okay! Du denkst nicht, dass ich mich schaue? Okay. Ist das unser Falt? Okay, gehen wir das zu Jeff Jarvis, über die Baffhäuse oder wo er jetzt nackt ist. Okay. Bis jemand decide, dass sie unsere Freundin wollen, will sie uns ein Final- Oh! Oh, hey! Oh, hey! Hey! Oh, nein! Ich habe ihn geschaut, ich habe ihn versucht, um ihn zu drehen, aber es gibt hier 8 Millionen Lächer. Hallo! Hi! Hey, da! Ich... ich... ich... ich... Okay, nächstes! Das ist toll! Wie lange gibt es keine Mädchen? Wie lange wird es sein, dass... oh! Ich fühle mich sehr verabschiedet. Okay. Wenn jemand eine Frage hat, kann er die Stelle nehmen. Oh! Das hat nicht lange zu tun. Das ist lange. Nein, ich muss seine Vermission fragen. Kommt mal, Leute! Ich kann nicht sehen, ob es ein Computer ist. Wo ist er? Ist er hier? Hey! Wurde es mich nur auf die Waffe oder war es nur ich? Ich kann nicht! Er hat nicht gesagt, dass er nicht. Okay, wie viele Leute denken, ich sollte die nächste Frage haben? Wie viele Leute wollen hier bleiben? Okay, nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Sorry! Nur mit meinen Freunden. Okay! Sie können schauen! Kein Problem! Okay, warte! Das ist das, was man immer sagt. Ich bin so bereit, das Ding zu machen. Jetzt muss ich das Computer bewegen. Oh mein Gott, sie ist auf die Waffe! Hi! Hi! Hast du Audio? Nein! Okay, ich glaube, das war die größte Chatroulette, Gruppanything, die ich noch gehört habe. Wenn du eine größere Gruppchatroulette-Erlebnis hast, dann melde mich und sag mir. Aber ich werde dir nicht sagen, dass wir das Gesamtverband haben, das ist das größte Mass-Sexuellen-Erlebnis auf der Chatroulette. Oh, ihr euch! Ihr euch ist ein Bild von der Chatroulette. Ich wünsch, dass ihr in den New York Times seid. Hi! Okay, ich werde wirklich eine letzte Frage nehmen. Sie waren adorabel, oder? Aber ich glaube, wir haben das, was wir für sie angeschaut haben. Oder vielleicht was jeder gesagt hat. Wenn ich ein sehr lecker Journalist war, dann würde ich definitiv sagen, die Chatroulette ist alles über Dicks, das ist alles, was da ist, und es gibt keine Mädchen. Und jeder weiß Englisch, der die Types hat. Ich bin nicht sicher, was das Komposition der Room ist. Ich habe nicht die Frage, wer schreibt Dinge, wer poste Bilder zu Facebook, wer ist ein Journalist, wer setzt die Policy, aber ich würde hoffen, dass wir alle in den ganzen Teilen der lives ein paar von diesen witzigen und unverkürzlichen Wissen über Sex als wir in diese Spiele gehen. Das ist nicht nur über andere Menschen, die Sex haben. Wir alle haben Sex. Das ist für uns alle. Und nicht vergessen, dass du nächstes Mal etwas bilde oder etwas machen oder andere Menschen, die auf der Internet leben, sagen. Gott sei Dank! Er repsg Technology Er.... etwas evangelicales
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"Exposure. Connection. Pleasure. Its axiomatic that sex has driven mass adoption of the internet as a communications and publishing platform. But how does the internet in turn shape personal, social, and political expressions of sexuality? Looking back on the last ten years of the web — from the birth of blogging and the dot-com bust to the rise of social networking and moral panics around internet prostitution and amateur pornography — writer and activist Melissa Gira Grant will tease out key questions and propose a model for engaging with sex on the internet not as an online red light district to police to the margins, but as something central to our collective condition."
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10.5446/20922 (DOI)
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Okay, so good morning everybody or something. I wake up quite late because I'm a computer geek like everybody else. My name is Peter Sunde Kolmyshoppe. I'm half Norwegian, half Finnish, living in Malmo in Sweden which on the Danish border. And I actually live a bit in Berlin as well, so I feel at home. Thank you. I'm most famous for the pirate bay and I usually come and talk about the pirate bay, so I'm gonna actually start with that as usual. So you know what I'm talking about when I talk about Flatter. A little bit of my background, as I said, I'm multinational like everybody else nowadays. But when I was about nine years old, I got my first computer. It was an Amiga 500 and in order to actually use the computer, I had to have a software to use. I had to have games to play and all of that. And when you're nine years old, you don't have a lot of money, so everybody just copies. And we never thought about that as being something which could be bad or being wrong. And now I'm 31 and I realized that it's not bad. It's good. You should copy. Everything I know about computers and everything I do is because I copied something in the beginning. So I became a bit older, as I said, and I wanted to help other people learn things as I did. And I realized that you need to share in order to actually learn something. So in Sweden, there was an initiative called Pirat Piran that I joined. And the background of Pirat Piran was actually that you had the Antipirat Piran, which was Hollywood's different companies that set up a lobby organization talking about the bad things of file sharing. And being good people at copy, you actually take something which is bad and make it better. So Pirat Piran took the name of Antipirat Piran and removed the Antipirat Piran to make it a bit better. And this is what we do all the time. We also did different projects in Pirat Piran besides just writing articles and things like that. We went out on the first of May in Sweden where everybody wants better wages and better salaries and stuff like that. And we said we want a better society. And in order to get that, you actually have to have 100 megabit internet. And that was our parole on first of May. And in Sweden, most people have 100 megabit of internet. And that's only because of us and nothing else. We take credit for a lot of cool things. One of the other projects we started was the Pirate Bay, which today is quite huge. It's one of the 90 biggest websites in the world. The tracking system of the Pirate Bay, which is the system used for actually sharing information, torrents and so on, is closed. But when it was at this peak, it took about 65, 70% of all torrents in the world. It was actually passed on through the Pirate Bay tracker. And interesting thing is that bit-torn traffic on the internet is about 80% of all the traffic. That means that Pirate Bay was actually almost half of all of the internet's traffic. So Pirate Bay was running with three people, half of the internet. And problem here is that we're not the average type of people. So when Frederick was drunk or Gottfried was almost drunk, whatever you want to call it, and the Pirate Bay went down, half of the internet's traffic just vanished because nobody could fix the Pirate Bay. And like everybody else, Pirate Bay starts small. Google had their Lego box. We had a shoebox. This is the blue server here. It's actually the first server we had. It's in a shoebox that we actually couldn't afford. So we got it for free as well. We had Pirate Bay in Mexico because Gottfried was working for the government somehow. I don't know the details. And we found that running servers in Mexico is quite bad because if someone finds out that you're running an interesting system, they will start pressuring you for a bit more money. So the electrical company said we want 1,000 euros extra this week, otherwise we'll shut down the power for your whole company. And they did. So we moved to Sweden. And in Sweden, where all of us lived anyhow, we started getting quite famous. The thing with the Pirate Bay in Sweden was that at the time, we for the first time had enough bandwidth to actually build a bigger website. And all of the other torrent and file showing networks were being shut down. And the reason why they were being shut down was not because of legal issues. It was more about legal pressure. So people running file showing networks were usually 16, 17-year-old kids and got a letter from lawyers saying you need to shut down your website. We're going to sue you for all of the money in the world. They usually shut down. But we don't. We never shut down anything we do, except if it's broken and we don't want to fix it. We sent letters back to the American lawyers saying things like, well, you have problems with copyright law in the US and blah, blah, blah. And we sent a picture of this small polar bear and said these are actually running around in the streets of Sweden trying to eat us. That's a problem for us that we are more interested in solving. Thank you. And we sent maps showing here's the US, here is Europe, Sweden is part of Europe, it's not on your jurisdiction. And the lawyers didn't really understand if we were joking or not. So they became quite upset. And the boring thing was we found this really, really funny to reply to their letters in ways that didn't really expect. So it was quite sad when it stopped sending those letters to us. And this is one of my favorite letters I just want to brag about because this is actually a German company called Linotype. Maybe you know them. They make most of the fonts you have in your computers. They own Helvetica and all of those. They sent a threatening letter saying we found this torrent on Pirate Bay. It allows users to download all of our fonts and they're very expensive, so we don't want that to happen. And they said they sent this letter and another contract that we had to sign saying you will not allow anyone to download our or torrents that refer to our fonts. You will have to pay us 25,000 euros otherwise, you know, for the trespassing and all of this. And we wanted to be, you know, messy with them. So we sent back the same letter. So we changed that they had to pay us 25,000 euros for making full of the out of themselves. So we just copied all of the letter basically. And of course we used all of their fonts. Thanks. So problem with being smart as we are, being funny as we are, is that when you're doing something this good, you don't get a reply, which sucks. So I'm going to skip a bit here in the story because you probably heard about the Pirate Bay and the big raid, you know, Hollywood companies went to the White House. The White House forced the Swedish government to come over and they said, I don't skip it at all. I just talk about the whole story. Never mind. So the White House said that we're going to put Sweden on the trade sanction list with Cuba. So you can't actually trade with any US companies if you don't shut down the Pirate Bay. Politicians in Sweden are not allowed to go into a single case and say that you have to do this and this to the police. But they did anyhow. And in the end, Pirate Bay was shut down six weeks after the Minister of Justice actually visited the US. And what happened is that the Pirate Party in Sweden that was founded just a couple of months before got a lot of votes. They got a lot of supporters and then one of the biggest political parties in Sweden right now. They got 7.2% of the European Union election votes. So they have two people in parliament and they joined the Green Group, which I think is great because I vote Green as well, and forced the Green Group to agree with them on all of the issues surrounding copyright and so on in the European Union. And the Green Group is quite big. So that means that a lot of the European Union now votes Pirate when it comes to the issues that we are concerned about, like privacy and so on. And at the same time, us from Pirate Bay, we started going around speaking at events like this and we were inventive fair and wired and all of these newspapers. And it's quite fun. We met, this is me in Brazil. I met with a friend of mine. He's the president of Brazil for a couple of more months. It was quite funny because I never met him before and we went to the same conference and he came to me and gave me a big hug. And the first thing he said is that, hey, Peter, Brazil does not have an extradition treaty with Sweden, which is quite nice to know that I can never be extradited if I actually go to Brazil, if I actually end up losing in Sweden. And all of this is based on the notion that money needs to be transferred between parties for someone to actually make a living. All of these companies that wanted us to shut down only wanted it because we kind of ruined their business model. And they were saying, you know, Internet needs to change. We need to make money like we did before and we don't need to change anything. Internet needs to change. And at the same time, we as users of the Internet and, you know, consumers, creators, call it whatever you want, we had too much information. We had so much information, it was more a question for us, like, how could we actually sort all of this information and make it interesting for us? And we had so much music that we could never listen to all of the music at the same time as the record companies want us to pay like one euro for each song that we have. And not even people from Norway, which is a really rich country, can afford that. Other companies, other record companies started realizing that file sharing is actually something good. So in Sweden, we have a large coalition of small record companies that are really independent labels and so on that are really successful. They started selling things like this. This is a music box, one of the oldest musically mentioned, with hits from some of their artists. So you could buy this instead of a CD and you can play it by just manually rotating the arm and get some music out of it. At the same time as the music was free. And they made more money from this than they ever made before on selling CDs. So there's a lot of new thinking when it comes to business models on the internet. And all of these issues are very important. Not only because it's important to have evolution, as I want to call it, but it's also that we have new things coming along that will change not only how we participate in, for instance, music and movies. It's easy for the companies, the record companies and so on, say that we're just interested in things for free. But with inventions like this, this is the wrap wrap, which is a 3D printer. It can actually let you download physical objects and print them at home. For instance, a friend of mine, he was at a party and drank too much beer and he wanted to drink a glass of water the day after. And he couldn't find a glass. So he actually pirated a glass from the internet and printed it so he could have a glass of water. And this might sound strange, but this is the way it's probably going to be in the future. This is the vision we have to make as a place where we can actually do things like this legally. Because if the companies today that are trying to control the discourse and the discussion surrounding intellectual property have their way, that's going to be legal. So one of these things that I came up with is Flatter, which is one of my ideas on how to actually make people able to share money. Because I'm very interested in the sharing concept. And money today is like everything else, digital information. We don't give cash to each other that much anymore. Most of the governments want to ban that because they want to look at what you do, but that's a different story. Flatter is a word play of Flatter-atom and flattering someone, which in English means to give someone a bit of credit. And since I'm talking so much, I'm actually going to show you a video instead, which shows everything quite nice. On the internet, you can create or take part of content. When you create, there's not really a good way to get money for the content. And when you find something you like, there's no good way to show love for it. This problem is universal. For bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film creators, programmers, and so on. So we created Flatter to solve this. This is how it works. Every month, the Flatter user pays a small fee. Let's compare it with birthday cake. When you have a cake, you want to give slices to the people you like. Flatter helps you do that. If you've created something, you can add a Flatter button to your content. Or if you find something you like, and there's a Flatter button besides the content, you click it. Each button is a counter showing how many people are willing to give cake for the content. At the end of the month, your cake is sliced in as many pieces as you clicked Flatter buttons. Each slice is then given to the correct content creator. If you click 10 buttons, the 10 creators will get a tenth of the cake each. If you click a hundred buttons, the hundred creators will get a hundredth of the cake. The slices might be small, but everyone's slices will all add up. Or as we say in Sweden, många bekar små, blerens står, å. As a creator, you will get money you've never got before. As a consumer, you can help creators out with just a small click. If you haven't guessed it, Flatter is a word play of Flatter and Flatter rate. With a Flatter rate fee, you can Flatter people. Okay, so the problem with being here today is that Flatter is still in closed beta. The video shows everything you need to know about it really, so I could just go from here now. But I'm going to show you some of the sneak peeks of how the system actually works. First of all, that is not only to share money when it comes to content. I don't like the word content. That is to make a system in place where actually changes a bit of your behavior on the internet. Most of the internet is binary. We have zeros and we have ones. And usually when you are interested in some sort of information, you evaluate how much it's worth to you. So this song is worth one euro, this information, this blog article is worth so and so much. With Flatter, we kind of remove that thinking because you pay once a month and that money will be divided no matter how many buttons or Flatter buttons you click. So in essence, this becomes binary. You have the one, I like it, you have the zero, I don't like it. You don't have to put a price tag on any type of information anymore. That is our goal. And when I talk about information, I actually want people in the future to be able to walk into a gallery, find a nice painting and kind of Flatter it with a cell phone or something like that. So we're interested in lots of more things than just blogs and stuff like that. Another interesting concept is also that within Flatter, everybody is the same type of user. I come from Sweden, we have a socialist background. We don't like classes in Sweden. I'm not talking about classes in school, I talk about classes in society. We don't like classes in school either. That's another story. But what is actually happening is that as a user, you're also a receiver. You're a receiver and you're a giver. That sounds very gay, but that's a different thing. But the concept is that no longer do you have to be a blog writer to actually earn money from a blog, it's totally possible that you as a blog reader could get flattered for a comment that you put. So even though people don't like the blog entry, they could like your comments you wrote about it and Flatter that. There's no price tags, it doesn't cost them more, it doesn't cost them less, it's just another click. You like it and its quality. And this is actually a typical Flatter page of Flatter. This button is like dig. Most people probably know dig here, so I'm not going into details. You can put one of these buttons on your website or whatever. They are also an API you can use in order to make other things than just buttons. We're looking forward to people implementing Flatter ID, see MP3 files, so you can actually play a song in iTunes or in Winamp with a Flatter plugin and just give money to the creator. Maybe in Spotify or Last FM there would be a Flatter button to the artist to give them money instead of the record company. And as I use your Flatter, you can go into the dashboard and here you can see how much money you have on your account, how much money you're going to spend each month. And you can see transaction history that you've received money, you've given money and all of that. The typical stuff you would consider from a site like this. And I know I have like half an hour, but I'm already finished. Thank you. So I'm opening up for questions. Thanks. There are questions. Microphones are behind you in the row? This is actually not my shortest speech. I was in Brazil. I was trying to tell you before and I had a speech and I was prepared for it and then afterwards they said, oh, you have your second speech about technology and I was not prepared for it, but I managed to do eight minutes. And then after questions it ended up being one and a half hours. So I hope there's going to be a lot of questions today as well. Okay. So I really, really like your concept, but what I don't like about it is that Flatter is becoming like a bank. So is there a possible way to decentralize this? And also is the code open? The code will probably be open in the end when we're, it's like the pirate bay. We don't, we never released the pirate bay code because it was bad quality. Flatter will probably be higher quality and we are going to encourage people to do something similar. But there's also security issues in that. And yes, there is a problem with this being centralized, but we haven't found a better method to make this without being centralized. But I will encourage people to do something similar, but the problem is then if people do something similar, there's going to be the, you know, a race for having a crucial mass. So you need an open standard for internet money? We need an open standard for everything. It's like, I hate Facebook for the reason that they own your profile. This is not really relevant, but at the same time it is. A friend of mine added content to Facebook that Facebook didn't like. It was a picture of a male genitalia and they were really upset about it. So they deleted him and he no longer get invited to parties and things like that because Facebook is where you invite people today. So he's really lonely because he has no Facebook profile. That is a real problem today. The same will probably go be a problem for Flatter that if too many people start using Flatter and then start relying upon that, there needs to be some sort of open standard where we can shift the power back to the users. So I'm curious how to get an invite. I have 20 invites for a public. Oh, wow, this is fun. Sign me up. Okay, so I'm gonna do a small thing. I've made it very easy to sign up for Republica people today. I've made 20 invites. The name of the invite is Republica and then 0-1 to 20. So just go and use the invite. So Republica 0-1, 0-2 and so on. That's 20 invites for you. I'm not online right now, so I won't qualify. On the very last slide you showed there was an interesting relation of a Flatter fee to the total amount. It was five euros Flatter fee and a total balance of 17 euros. It's quite an interesting ratio. That's gonna be like that. Well, this is from the beta version and the Flatter fee was actually what I decided that I wanted to give that month. And it's not really a fee because it's the monthly allowance, the amount of money you want to give to people. We're gonna take a small portion and we're gonna try to make it as small as possible. But the five euros is actually the thing you give to other people. So could you give us an idea what the actual fee is or how much it will cost for the user? For from our to pay Flatter or to pay other people? What either the people who donate or who spend money on Flatter or the people who receive the money have to pay as a fee for you. Okay, so right now the thing is you have to put in two euros a month as a minimum and we will take 10%. We're trying to make that lower but that depends also on what we see under the beta period. So and from our fee we will also do some sort of revenue sharing with content providers that distributors rather. So if you have a blog network or something that you allow people to blog you could actually get for a finally another way than just adds to actually get paid. So I don't know if people use a Bambuser in Germany. It's a Swedish website where you can actually stream videos for free from your cell phone. They need things like this in order to actually survive and this is one method we think could actually give them money. There's one micro payment service which is already out of the better face called Kachinger and I was wondering what do you see the difference between those two services except that they also have this monthly fee of five dollars and then you can decide how much you want to pay for the individual payment and you know I think they take also small percentage fee and I think that would be interesting to see when are you getting out of the better face and opening up other any time plans for that. So the difference between Kachinger and Flatter besides that we have a much better name that they have they end in the typical Google thing then with catching and we end with the flicker thing with the missing E so that's the big difference. I'm just kidding. The problem with the Kachinger is that I think they're gonna have a hard time to reach critical mass. I wish them the best. They started with saying we are copycats even though I've been talking about Flatter for three years and they started last year which is quite kind of funny and also if you have the concept that everybody else is a copycat and you're upset with them you shouldn't really be into the business of helping people sharing things. But you know I think it's good that there's more competitors out there and I hope that we will find one solution that works quite well instead of having no solution. Maybe I missed that but do you have a time frame on when the better is sort of gonna be ended and yeah okay so right now we're in this this close beta and we're going to the open beta which is going to invite everybody who has to be signed up within a month or so and then in two months hopefully we're gonna open up to the public and then try to get as many people as possible to use the service. Did you have another question? Okay, I was a little late that's why I'm so sure if you already talked about it. Some journalists see a huge contradiction between your engagement with Pirate Bay and with Flatter could you explain the ideological connection okay so your head between them? Okay so I think it's the same Pirate Bay and Flatter are the same values we want to open up for the without the middlemen we don't want the big corporations controlling content and information anymore. So Pirate Bay was a way that you could actually share information share content with people without someone deciding what you should share and with Flatter you could actually set up a system where you can send money between people without having a middleman that decides which content is good for you. So it's about an open platform and we have never been against people actually earning money from being making culture or art or something like that. We've been very for it but we don't want big corporations controlling the culture and art. So in that way Flatter and Pirate Bay are extension of each other and for me it's very important that everything I do is politically valid for me as a person. So this is just an extension of my thinking politically. Okay. I just have the question is there any other plans that you will extend it away from just well money of course it's intriguing to get money into something I call social clout that you have a renome that you can somehow monetize. So yeah of course Flatter has top list of most interesting things blogs and tagged like this and this and in each country and so on. So we of course we do a site similar to dig but with the extra added bonus of money. But and we're gonna open it up for API so you can implement it and show people you can brag off on Facebook or Twitter or whatever you just flattered and help people get content like that. We're really interested in helping people to get the word of their interesting material out there. So yes information spreading is good. How do you handle usage data so you're storing data who liked what or who fled at work so do you delete data after you paid the money? Right now we haven't set up the deletions system. We're still making the system but we are I'm putting my reputation on Flatter and I'm one of the people that are most concerned about privacy on the internet probably. So you know I run VPN services and so on. So we are very much for privacy and we're gonna be very open with what we store how long we store it and we're gonna try to minimize it as much as possible. Today if you don't want to actually receive money if you just want to help people out and give money you don't have to give us anything else than an email and you could if you want to use one of our other services which is an anonymous email that you don't have to register for and then use that or something else like that. We don't really care as long as you help out and someone else is already has all of the information about your identity otherwise you can't have a bank account and so on. So if you send money to Flatter from PayPal they know who you are so we don't care we don't want to know. Right now the primary motivation for users is to sign up simply to do good. Is there anything else how you motivate users in the future to sign up for your service? Well there is this thing that we want to change the concept of who is receiving creativity or who is a creative person. So as I talked about before for instance if you put a possibility on blogs to Flatters a comment and not just of the blog post that will actually make it more interesting for everybody to participate because everything you do on the internet you everybody likes and everybody comments on things you don't have to be very bright to do that you can be really stupid or it could be very bright it doesn't matter. It's a very low threshold before you actually start creating on the internet. So and we want to encourage that and we want those people to also be able to benefit from it and get a sense of satisfaction and since this is kind of a classless system you know everybody has to participate to to receive. Thank you Peter. Thank you. Okay so no more questions. Are they already out? Oh right on on Twitter with the flatter hashtag and probably someone at the office I think they're still there they have to be it's only 6 p.m. in Sweden. We work quite late. They will probably make some more if you're very nice. All right I have a question for you. You said let's say I made my mind up and as I put up two euros for a monthly for my monthly cake so to say and I only click once. Is there a way that I can decide afterwards that I don't want to pay the two euros to one person? No. Right. Do you have statistics to back up usage from the Kles beta period? Sorry to back up usage. What amount was usually received or something like that? Yeah right now it's been very weird because I I got 20 faders on my own blog and a blog post on my blog and I received nine euros for that so that's quite high and I don't think it's gonna be that high but that if it's that high I'm really happy. That's the only uses the stats I have right now. Okay. Vielen Dank Peter Sonder. Okay so thank you.
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Flattr experiments with a new way on taking on the long lasting question - how will people make money on the internet? Theres always been a lot of talk on how people will make money on what they create on the internet. The focus of these discussions has always been how to compensate for previous losses that occurs in the paradigm shift to the Internet. Flattr tries to tackle this problem in another way why shouldnt everybody have the possibility to be compensated or paid for content? And why is everything easier on the internet than in the offline world, except payments? Previous spokes person for The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, gives his story on why he created Flattr and how he believes this experiment may benefit art and culture.
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10.5446/20898 (DOI)
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Okay, sorry for the delay. This will be only in English, this podium that we have now. I think we're still working on the technique here. Okay, now we come to a very different political aspect. Political blogging, political journalism in countries where they have a strong censorship. And we have three speakers from China, Bahrain and the US. And Lucy Morillon sitting in the middle, volunteered to do the actual moderation, so I'm only introducing her. And I hope everyone has a good panel and please at least start with a warm welcome to them. Thank you. Loris Morillon, and you introduce the other. Okay. Hi everyone, it's good to be here today. Thanks for attending this panel, which is going to be, I have no doubt, very interesting. I'm really happy to be sitting here today with two amazing bloggers. I want to introduce first Amira Al-Hoseini. She is a columnist, translator, editor and blogger from Bahrain. She has been working for print media since 1991, but she started blogging in 2004 and in 2006 she joined Global Voices Online. She is now the Middle East and North Africa and Arabic language editor of Global Voices. In 2008 she ran Voices Without Vote, a project that was commissioned by Reuters to track and summarize the reactions of citizen journalists to the US presidential elections and foreign policy. So, Amira, thank you for being here with us today. Now I would like to introduce, if it really needs an introduction, again, Michael Enti. Michael is a Chinese blogger, media researcher and political columnist for Chinese and foreign media. He taught international reporting at the Journalism School of Chantou University. He worked as a researcher for the New York Times and the Washington Post. He's also publisher of the Foreign White Journal. He served as a reporter in Baghdad also for the 21st century World Herald. He is once a popular political blog, was removed by Microsoft in 2005. It was something that has been widely publicized. Today his Twitter account, I'm not sure if I should give actually your Twitter ID, is one of the most influential micro-blogging in China. So, thank you both for being here today. I work for Reporters Without Borders. We are an international press freedom organization that defends the right to inform and to be informed, which means that it's not only talking about journalists, we are talking about everyone, and we have been working this past years a lot on online free speech. Today we've seen that internet censorship is a very hot topic in many countries, in more and more countries around the world, with the general trend being more repression, more control on the web, and netizens and bloggers being subjected to different kind of threats. So, we're going to start with Amira, and I'm going to ask her to share with us her experience with blogging in the Arab world what kind of threats our bloggers confronted to, what kind of censorship do they have to deal with? Blogging in the Arab world is not like walking in the park. If you write about things like, there is an echo, if you write about things like what you do every day or what you eat or where you walk your dog, then you're fine. But if you're talking about more denser topics like human rights, torture, freedom of expression, democracy, or if you get involved into like the three taboos we have, the three taboos which are sex, religion, and politics, then you are courting trouble, you're calling for trouble. Out of the world's ten worst online oppressors, five are in the Middle East and North Africa. Bloggers are most at risk in Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. And its report issued, I think, last year or the year before, which was entitled, the ten worst places to be a blogger. According to the same organization in 2008, for the first time in the world, there were more online bloggers in jail than journalists from print media. Out of the 125 journalists who were jailed, 56 were web-based journalists or bloggers. I'll give you a short historical overview. In our part of the world, TV stations, radio, and even newspapers are all government-owned or totally government-controlled. So this idea of people expressing themselves and talking about things without any inhibitions or any censorship is totally foreign and new. Then five years ago, come the internet, and everybody's on blogger and online forums and talking freely. So this created a sense of the government is letting go of its control. People can talk, people can write, people can upload videos of themselves. And this created a system of, wow, they cannot do that. They're not allowed to do that. So let's crack down on that. And you all know how this happens. What I'll do now is I'll give you a very brief outline of some of the censorship we, or some of the harassment we go through in the Arab world. I come from Bahrain. Bahrain is a very, very tiny country. Not many of you may have heard of it. Has anyone here heard of Bahrain? Oh, good. Okay, so when people started blogging and blogging became a popular platform for expressing your views, what they did was they issued a ministerial decree saying that all bloggers have to register their blogs at the Ministry of Information. Like, nobody did it, but it was still a law. And it's still a law which exists to today. So we'll start, we talked about Bahrain, so we'll start with Bahrain. Bahrain is a country which actively censors the internet. Even something like we have hundreds of thousands of sites which have been blocked for anything. Any reason, like, of course all pornography is blocked, all many religious sites are blocked, many, anything that the government doesn't want you to see or know about is blocked, including a lot of the local online forums and many of the local blogs, many of the sites for the political organizations. We're not allowed to have political organizations in Bahrain anyway, so like if there is, they call themselves societies, like even those societies, their websites are blocked, are blocked, and the activists working in them who have blogs, blogs are blocked too. And then the blocking is not just on their websites, but also on their Facebook accounts, and it goes on and on. Like one of the most popular online forums in Bahrain is called BahrainOnline.org, where they discuss events, and this too has been blocked, and its administrators were jailed for around two weeks in 2005 because somebody posted anti-government slogans on that website, so it's been blocked ever since from 2005 until today, and despite that it's one of the most popular online forums in Bahrain. Now we'll move to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is officially named as an enemy of the internet. It actively censors the internet, and they don't mark it. They don't mask it in any way. Like if you go and you try to access something, they'll tell you this site is blocked. It's not that it's an error, or you can't access the page or anything, no, we don't want this site, and it's been blocked. There's been a lot of, like, very... What's the word for it? There's been a lot of stories which were very highly publicized about Saudi Arabian bloggers being arrested, and one of the, like, icons, like, stories we can talk about is like Fahad al-Farhan, who's a Saudi blogger, who was arrested for 140 days because he wrote something in support of reformists, and he no longer blogs, right? No. I wouldn't, too. And for a short period of time, Saudi Arabia blocked blogger.com, as if there are no other platforms to blog on. Kuwait is more open. There is more political, like, freedom and openness, and it's one of the first countries to embrace democracy in this part of the world, and despite that, in 2007, we had an incident where one blogger called Bashar Asliyem was arrested for comments published on his blog by an anonymous commentator, and this really created, like, it sent shockwaves down that blog sphere because you would think, I cannot write, and then you'd think twice before commenting on what somebody else has written because there is jail involved. Qatar, too. Like, I haven't heard about a lot of censorship from Qatar, but they block social networking platforms like tagged, for instance, is blocked there. The United Arab Emirates filters the internet as well. There are a lot of sites there which are blocked, including Flickr. So you can't upload your pictures, and every once in a while we hear stories about, oh, YouTube could be blocked there, Twitter could be blocked, and, like, it comes and goes. Libya a few weeks ago blocked YouTube. Aman, too. Aman also has a lot of laws. So any forum or website which criticizes not just the government, but any of the government-owned businesses could be shut down and its administrators put on trial. Moving on, Yemen. Yemen has a track record over the past three years of intimidating and targeting bloggers, harassing them, and arresting them, and putting them in jail as well. Not only that, but the security apparatus actually threatened those bloggers with death, and, like, the intimidation is increasing at an alarming rate. Egypt is an enemy of the internet, and it makes the most headlines because Egyptian internet users are very, very, very active. Like, if somebody is arrested, you hear about it immediately. They're out there on Facebook, on Twitter, on their blogs, on every single social networking platform telling the world what has happened. Two years ago there was an American blogger who got arrested, and he tweeted it, and immediately said, I just got arrested, and the whole world knew about it. His name was James Bucks. Also, in Egypt, like, a lot of bloggers are arrested. We have a website at Global Voices called Threaten Voices, and if you go there and you click on Egypt, you'll see the names of around 30 bloggers who are arrested and links to their stories as well. Moving on to Tunisia. Tunisia is also an enemy of the internet. We have a Tunisian blogger here, Sami, and he can tell us a lot more about it. In Tunisia, all the internet cafes are state-controlled. A lot of the sites, like, blogger, WordPress, YouTube, no, that's another country, that's Turkey. What's blocked in Tunisia, Sami? YouTube and Daily Motion are blocked. Okay, YouTube and Daily Motion are blocked. Wow. Okay, where are we now? That's it. Do you want to hear about Iran? No. So that's it from me. Thank you. Thank you, Amir. It was an interesting overview of situations in different countries, from countries like Saudi Arabia, where indeed censorship is something completely claimed by the authorities. I think when you try to access some websites that are blocked, they are telling you this is blocked by the ministry. And you can also, if you're a citizen, you can denounce some websites that you deem obscene, or that you just won't be blocked. So it's interesting to see this kind of censorship. And other countries like Tunisia, where it's more pernicious, where the censorship is, you know, where the authorities are pretending they're not censoring, or they do not censor political content, where this is actually the case. So I'm just going to turn over to Michael. China has been a lot in the news recently regarding internet censorship because of the Google case, because of all that has been said by Hillary Clinton, and this historical speech she made about the internet being at the core of the US foreign policy. Can you tell us a little bit about internet censorship in China, of course, but what do Chinese netizens do when they are confronted to these problems? I think China now has the largest censorship system in the world, and also it is the sample for every other country who wants to follow. It's not only about the country like Iran or Arabic countries, but also including Australia, right? So the Western countries also want to follow some part of the experience that are already practiced in China. But censorship is not only about censorship. In China, censorship totally is a multi-layer system, including censorship and self-censorship. Sometimes you will fear self-censorship is more serious than censorship itself. And censorship is not only about politics, sometimes censorship is also about business. In the past one year, more and more cases show now the Chinese authorities in different departments and ministries try to utinize the censorship system as the way of fighting for the license market. Because, give example, if you want to have a startup in the West, you just have your domain name and you have your host. It's easy, but in China you should apply for licenses. Several years ago, you only need one license, so buy ICP license. But now you need many licenses. For example, if you own a page, if you have any link with the video, you should have a video license to their bureau in charge of the movie and broadcasting services. I think almost about a dozen ministries and the governmental department want to control this license business. Sometimes when the top leader said the internet is a battlefield, they can utinize this as real business. And also about, I mentioned, let me first introduce the multi-layer censorship system. Generally, the area is what we call China's grid-fighting war. It is in the gate when they get Chinese internet to the American internet, or Japanese through the ocean cable. There is the grid-fighting war, because we have Chinese grid-fighting war. Anything, any political sensitive words, including other sensitive words, for example, pornography, or some website, the name, they don't want the people, the Chinese people to read. They have a long list to ban. So, for example, also including most of the famous web 2.0 services, which are really blocked inside China, like Twitter.com, like Facebook.com, like Flickr.com, like YouTube.com. That means when you're enjoying the happiness of the internet in the West, most of the websites you are, you know, you are log on, you can't access inside China. But how can Chinese do to facing this situation? Of course, the Chinese encouraged the Chinese company to do the Chinese copycat. For example, if you have Google.com, we have Baidu.com. We have a self-censored Chinese searching website. And also, when the competition with Google, because the help, due to the help of the censorship and the governmental sponsor, Baidu did very good compared to the Google Chinese company. And also, in the year 2002, the censorship system blocked Google.com, so the whole Google site for one month just want to improve the market share of Baidu.com. You have YouTube, so in China, because the video is so hard for China to go into a fight war to censor. So they just blocked YouTube.com. They encouraged the Chinese internet users to log on via copycats like todo.com and youku.com. That's definitely, it's very similar to YouTube.com. And also Facebook, Facebook, they was blocked after the Xinjiang rights because they claim that the Xinjiang anti-government, anti-central government moment used Facebook to build up a group to deliver information, disident information. And same as the Twitter.com is blocked just last July. But Chinese also has the largest numbers of their netizens. We have 300 million netizens in China. The same population, the whole population of the United States. So people also need to talk, to use the internet, to do the social networking. Besides the, we are Chinese copycat and self-censorship. We also, the censorship system is not only about great fight war, and also about self-censorship. So every website inside China, they should have a kind of inside censor. That means they censor by themselves. Otherwise, the website itself will be punished by the government. It's kind of through punishment and the reward that you can build up your sense of their self-censorship. And censorship is not only by punishment, it's not only punitive. Sometimes you give you the way. For example, why most of Chinese companies volunteer to do the self-censorship? Because this, only in this way, he can get a sponsor, policy sponsor from the central government. Baidu just did this. And even worse, in the year of 2002, why part of the reason Google.com was blocking inside China, it is because Baidu.com complained to the government that there were some sensitive, political sensitive words on Google.com. It's a kind of very dirty thing because it's not about punitive action made by the government. Sometimes the Chinese company think self-censorship can make you live well. And also about people because the whole education is about propaganda. So if you know, if you practice some kind of censorship, you can do, it's not only doing well, but also because China, Deng Xiaoping opened China in 1978. So we have already opened up, I mean, in the sense of a person life, economy life, and social life. In this way, compared to Iran, China is pretty free country, but not about politics. So we, in the past 30 years, Chinese people have already built up some kind of new social contract with the government. That means you give me the free personal freedom, economy, the booming, so I can submit, hand out my political rights. As long as Chinese GDP is still keeping the 8% to the 10%. As long as the Chinese miracle, and as long as the Chinese successful economy story going, I think this is social, the new social contract will exist. But of course, you can see because of the financial crisis, now the Chinese government really facing the different way. So this is, the self-censorship also can build inside the system and also inside a person. Even me, for example, if really want to, I go abroad and go back to the country easily and freely without questioning, maybe I will keep some kind of self-censorship, not directly to talk about the top, of the very important issues of the politics. So everyone practice that, it's the reality of the Chinese censorship and the self-censorship. But Chinese internet always have already developed, developed a kind of a new way to confront the censorship. For example, we use different wording and also this kind of trend become very popular. For example, we have a very funny animal we call the grass root house. Grass mood house. It's a horse. Basically it's a kind of, but it's an animal. It's a llama. Yeah, but what's the English for that? But no, the real animal. It's a llama? Yeah, it's a little, it's a llama, it's the right, it's very weird animal. But we said it's a grass mood, the horse. But why? Because the Chinese character for these three characters is the same spelling with the motherfucker. Why? Because we think the censorship is really fucking system. So we, but what kind of, it's also bad. You just, it's very, if you really to curse on the internet about against the system, you are totally bad. So we just, to create a new animal, even MTV video and the song to praising of that. And also we changed the harmony society, the harmony, we said censorship is for the harmony society. So harmony, we also said the river crab is the same spelling in Chinese. So now become this animal, the horse, the grass mood house versus the river crab. This is a war, right? It's the, it's the, it's the netizens versus the Chinese sense, Chinese governmental censorship. But why we use this way because, because censorship and self-censorship means threat, also means fear. When you use this very funny way to directly confront in a very artist way against the censorship, that means you do not fear. That's the way you very effectively change the situation. Thank you Michael. I don't want to censor you, but I just want to leave a little bit of time for the questions from the public. So thank you for your intervention. Yeah, you want to ask a question? Can you stand up if you don't mind and speak a little louder? Oh, you can borrow my microphone if you want. Yeah, I would like to know if you think that Google left China, does it help? Or other way, the question turned other way around, what would help China or people in China or even in Arabia? I think it's the same, but I think it's in China, it's a little bit more drastically. The system is a lot more perfect. So what would help? What could other countries do? For example, how do you think when Google left China, is it helpful or is it like, okay, they gave up and that's it? I should say, when we say Google pulling out of the mainland China, because it's still in China, Hong Kong is part of China. But that actually is the Chinese searching part out of China, because in China we still can use the Google.com to search everything. But very important things, why when Google announced on their blog that they were pulled out from China. So you can see a lot of people, young people send flowers to the headquarter in the offices in Shanghai, Guangdong, Beijing. You know, in the past the cases when some headlines always said something versus China, the Chinese were rally around the flag and support the China, not something. But this is the first time when something versus China will support Google. Why? Because Google is not only an American company, that's Gmail, that's Picasso, that's our property. So Chinese is not only stand on the Google side, we stand on our own side. But when Google pulling out China, it's only the Daxi En service, it's self-censored part of Google, which I think was a mistake when Google first made decision to enter China, have the self-censorship. Because if you get used to the self-censored, why not just use the Baidu.com? So for most people really love their free information, we have already used the Google.com, the comprehensive version of Google. I never used the Google.com. And also when Google pulling out China, when Chinese people to search Google fund, they have already transferred the website to the Hong Kong site. And also when you type the keywords, it's not come out without the original, the old display will be according to the law, you can't find the result. But now it's just the internet connection cut off. So in this way, more and more Chinese netizens will know the existence of censorship. There were post-meaning civil people to use the VPN, to use the proxy to access the free internet. Because everyone think they are not deserve the censorship award. Because information also means advantage in this commercial society. Thank you. I think we have another question here. This morning there was a presentation from Evgeny Morozov who said basically that the revolution thanks to internet will never happen. Because internet is just a powerful tool for the regimes authority in regimes as for the freedom fighters to watch them spy on them, to entertain the masses and to broadcast propaganda and spin. What do you think about that? Is internet really an interesting media or is it not two-sided? I just say the term, because I think different countries have different stories. I just said China cases. Because by nature, this communism or any other names doesn't match the nature of internet. Internet is about decentralized information and decentralized everything. Of course Chinese government can, they are learning, they can hire people to know how to control. Not before it's block sphere, now maybe more and more on Twitter.com. But by nature it doesn't match. I don't think there is such things called censorship 2.0 because it doesn't match. And also Twitter.com, I just give one example. Twitter.com, they already blocked Twitter.com last July. But because you have already blocked, that means you can't die twice. Now because Twitter has the API policy, everyone can build up their client on their website to access Twitter. So most of the Chinese Twitter users now they use the third party application to access Twitter. So Twitter, because of blocking, now Twitter becomes the first non-censored public and national platform for Chinese for debating, negotiating and talking. So that's the first real chance for Chinese people. In the past one year, I've said, I can say Chinese people did good. We deserve a big fight. You want to step in? For us in the Middle East it's like a double-edged sword because both are playing the same game. And we saw this in the Palestinians' really conflict over Gaza, where there was information from both sides swamping the internet overnight. And for us, like people on the outside, you don't know what is being said and what the real story is. It's the same with governments as well. They actually employ people who come through the internet for information. Otherwise they are aware of everything that's being said whenever, like in Bahrain. I know for a fact that the Minister of Information, in addition to filtering, they have a whole army of people coming to the internet for any subversive material. Other countries employ those tactics as well. We have another question here. I just wanted to know, I have friends in Bahrain too. I know from those friends in Bahrain that it's not really a problem for them to use a proxy to surpass their censorship. As far as I understood, they are not even afraid of it. It's just normal usage. I would like to know how is it in Bahrain and all these Arab countries or Middle East countries, is this technically possible to use a proxy? And second, are these people prosecuted? Is there any possibility to track them down? No, but it creates a culture of fear. And if something is blocked, you automatically know, oh, I'm not supposed to see this. What if the police see me seeing this? It creates that culture among people because people don't know what their rights are and what the regulations are. People are afraid. People would say, oh, if I go to that online forum, do you think I'll be arrested? And these are people who are educated. And all proxy services are blocked. And here's one screen shot. It says that the site is blocked. This site has been blocked by the order of the Ministry of Culture and Information. Based on article 19 of decree number 47, 2002, regarding the organization of the press printing and publishing in the Kingdom of Bahrain, due to the publication of prohibited content on the aforementioned site, like a nonsensical sentence. And that's what there is. And this is the message which pops out every time you try to access anything. A friend of mine from Global Voices Online designed a t-shirt and sent me the link to see if I like the design for some event. And I tried to open it and I couldn't access the site. I got a site blocked and it's like a t-shirt site. Thank you. Michael, you want to add something on the proxy and the convention tools? Or not. I think VPN is very popular inside China. Why? You know, Chinese government want to, of course, want to ban and block the free VPN. It's kind of a competition fight. But the setup blocked commercial VPN. So if you buy the VPN, that's fine, because in China, it's not only leave the Chinese people live in China, but also many like Fortune 500 company staff and workers, they work there and they should communicate with the headquarters. China economy is very crucial for China, because China is success story in globalization. So that's why in Beijing, most of the metropolises, you can still use the commercial VPN to access the free internet. But of course, you need money. Yeah, in the back? Yeah, if you can otherwise, I mean, as you wish. I just remembered something like, if you go on a search engine and you try to search for the word proxy, you get this filtering message as well. Yes, I come from Greece and blogging is very big in Greece. In December 2008, you remember we had big riots in Greece during one month. And it was very astonishing how important blogging was for these riots and for the protest movement there. It actually became the most Twitter and the blogs became the most important medium for networking for activists. On net blogging, they made appointments of where to meet, when to meet, they could distribute information. They would never show in the established media. They actually forced the established media to show things the established media would never have shown. And they also, for me, the fresh thing about it was that they also somehow could also avoid the more traditional left or the more. It was somehow like a fresh movement like this. Surely in Greece we don't have censorship, yes, we don't have a censored net, but we saw also this in Iran afterwards, some months after the riots in Greece. I wanted to ask you if there is something you think is in common in your countries with this phenomenon too. Yes, of course I think in China because I just mentioned Twitter was already blocked, but you can't die twice. So now ironically, Twitter becomes very open and public and a nonsense platform just as same as Greece and all the western countries. So the same situation you mentioned in your country will happen in our country. So people use Twitter to mobilize the social protest to communicate to each other because China is so big. And we have, except the people stated this in the very party newspaper, we have no market-oriented national newspaper. But Twitter now built up the first uncensored platform. So even in your remote provinces, you are very peasant, you met the social injustice. But when you get Twitter or you call your friends to Twitter, the Beijing media guy or even the Reuters in Beijing, corresponding Beijing, you can easily follow your news and retweet you. So it's actually built up a very effective platform for activists, for lawyers, for liberal professors. I think that's because thanks to the blocking. So we have totally free because 100% freedom of speech on the blog.twinter.com. So that's a good thing. So in the past one year, almost every week on the Chinese Twitter community, they mobilized one event. So sometimes not only about China, last December, we have the hashtag called CN4Iran. It's the Chinese netizens supporting the Green Revolutionary, the Iranian people, and become the number four of all the trending topics in the Twitter.com, wordly. So this is the first time Chinese not only self-interest or nationalist will support the other countries' freedom. Because not because of Twitter.com. We know freedom is not only about American freedom, it's about everyone's universal freedom. What is the general opinion about censoring the Internet? Is it thoughts like, oh, we have our proxies, we're fine, we don't need anything, or is it we need revolution? Please, everybody help us, or is it I'm so unhappy without the free Internet? If I live in a small country, I can say, please help me, save us. But I live in a country as big as Canada, America, and Russia. Chinese people can only depend on ourselves to seek democracy. Because democracy in a big country just means democracy within. So freedom of speech, of course, I think we have censorship. It's our duty to push down this great firewall. But also, the people outside China, but you should understand our fighting, our situation inside China. We can become friends in the same front. Just like we support by the hashtag way to support the Iranian people. I can't say, come to our country to save us. No, Chinese democracy can only build up by Chinese people. But if you support Internet freedom, so stop censorship, not only in China, but also in every country, including Australia, Britain. I think we have time for one or two questions maximum. Anyone else want to ask a question? So yes, this is more directed to Amira. Something which did not turn up in Afgani Morozov's talk today, but which I think should probably have, is what I think he pointed to in a recent blog post, that there's a high probability that the Internet as a communication tool empowers illiberal movements in the Arab world. He especially pointed to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is in fact the strongest opposition group in Egypt. My question is, can free communication tools lead to a free society, or could it be that free communication tools could lead to a regime change without a change to a more free society? First of all, you're trying to get me into trouble. The Muslim Brotherhood are on the blogs and are on Twitter. They're very active. There is a blogger, an Egyptian blogger called Mahmood, who blogs as Anakhwan, which means I'm from the Brotherhood. He puts all their information there and what they're doing and even their statements whenever there's something. Many of them are active on Twitter. Does more freedom for everybody to express themselves mean more freedom in real life? It will take some time for that to transpire. People can aspire for freedom, but freedom... I really don't know how to go about it. If I say what I want to say, I'll get into trouble. If I don't say what I want to say, you'll leave saying what is this girl talking about? I think it's part okay if you give me a more shot. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We have one last question over there. That's not really a question, but maybe... I think that freedom in Germany, in Bahrain, wherever expressed by the internet comes with a certain responsibility. The thing is, what people say is, we want to take this responsibility. We want to make our mistakes. Whatever you think about Muslim Brotherhood, and if this is a mistake or whatever you think that is a religion from the Middle Ages or whatever, that's your opinion, but not the opinion of many other million people. If people today want to make mistakes, they have to be allowed to make mistakes. If you can make mistakes and share mistakes, then the learning goes a little bit quicker. I think that's the most important thing. Of course, there's a lot of cultural backgrounds which are maybe even less prepared for this freedom of the internet as it is in the Western society, which is also not prepared for the freedom of the internet in total. I think that's something we have to understand if we talk about the freedom of expression in the internet presented in the physical world of different nations and cultures. For that, I think Global Voices is really a good website to see the reality around the world and to reflect about it. In Kiwi, not in New Zealand, in Fiji, there's also quite a repressive thing going on right now. You wouldn't maybe expect that on Fiji, and maybe who in Germany cares about Fiji, but it's nice to learn if you look in the mirror of other nations and cultures. I think that is what we have to take the discussion on. I'm a little bit sick and tired of... I know it's hard in China and I know it's hard in Bahrain, and we have also fucked up politicians here who have no clue about the internet. So I know it's hard, but if we want to make this right, we have to think about our culture and what does the internet mean for that. And then we can talk to the normal people who have no clue about what the website can do. I think that has to be done now. I just add once something about this. I really think that the internet of freedom is a new thing. This right is a new right. You should compare it to the ground right, for example, the freedom of speech on the ground. So it's a comparison. But in China it's very weird because we lack the freedom of speech on the ground. We lack the press freedom on the ground. So internet freedom is the first freedom we practice. So we're on the opposite way. We first practiced internet freedom. So now we know, okay, now we order the press freedom. Then we go to the political freedom. So we never in China said, before we said, you know, we always say, someone said propaganda said, it's American democracy, western democracy. But now we never said it's American internet freedom. No, it's an interference of our own. So that's the best thing for China. We first practice this on the internet. Then we seek more on the ground. You want to add something? Yeah, like most of the young people, and when I say most, you'll agree with me. Even people from poor backgrounds who can't afford to have their own computers can access the internet cafes. And they're widely available. I'll tell you an example from Bahrain because that's where I grew up and lived all my life. When the internet was first introduced, and it's still, it's a very steep cost. Like it will cost you like 30 or 40 euros a month or maybe more. And that's money not everybody can afford. So what they did was like one house in the neighborhood would have internet and then they would make, make shift connections. And then you'll have four or five hundred people using the same line. So if you go to any neighborhood, you'll see one house and then all those wires dangling everywhere. And you think like what's going on here? And they're all the internet wires. So like access is there and people are using it. What the governments did was they pressured the telecom providers when they saw how popular internet was and how people were expressing themselves and sharing information like, oh, the riot police are here. Or, you know, like, because there are a lot of demonstrations and rallies and civil unrest which nobody here is about. But there, all this information is on the internet minute by minute as it's happening. They're uploading pictures, uploading videos. So what they did was they put a threshold on internet use. So like if I have a house, I pay and I have only like two megabytes per month. And I can't have more unless I pay more. So this restricted this freedom of exchange of information. Okay, they were stealing the service, but they were spreading more information. So now they're curtailing it and holding them from the hand which hurts more. So if you want to have access to the internet, first of all, you need to bypass the proxy. And Michael has as much information as I do about that because everything is blocked, like everything. If you go to the normal sites, the proxy sites, they're all blocked. And those people are so creative and know all the latest tools and gadgets and they exchange them between each other. They can access anything that's blocked. Yeah, I just want to add something. It's interesting to see the different perspective we can have on this issue, whether we are based in a country that is supposed to respect freedom of speech and where you come from a country where the internet is censored or controlled. It should be the topic of another panel, but we've seen democratic regimes in the past months and years actually trying to regulate the net even more in the name of the fight against child pornography or theft of intellectual property. So they have tried under these excuses to set up some filtering system and this is something that is pretty worrying for the future of the internet. Of course, we don't want to be saying that blocking a few websites dealing with child pornography is wrong, but setting up an automatic filtering system is another issue because when the tools are here, you can use them for other purposes and that's what is really worrying. But just to finish here, I just wanted to thank our two panelists. It was interesting to see and hear what you had to say and I guess you can follow them on Twitter to know more about what's happening. Thank you everyone for coming. Thank you.
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"Freedom of expression is for most participants of the re:publica a completely natural right. In many other nations freedom of expression and information outlets are restricted from cititzens. The panel will discuss this situation: What is life like in nations with a strong net censorship and government control of news flow? Which experiences do bloggers make when they point out misdoings? Inspite of the control, how can one use the internet to express their opinions freely, to network and inform oneself?"
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10.5446/20899 (DOI)
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Ja, wunderschönen guten Morgen. Normalerweise in solchen Umständen gesagt, man sowas liebe Freundinnen und Freunde, liebe Besucher der Republik, liebe neu dazugekommenen, liebe Teilnehmer der Re-Campaign, mir ist eine große Freude und ich bin sehr dankbar, dass ich heute die Veranstaltung hier nochmal mit eröffnen darf. Re-Campaign zum allerersten Mal im Rahmen der Republik. Ihr wisst, dass vielleicht, es ist ein Teil unseres Konzeptes, dass wir als Veranstalter der Republik versuchen, verschiedene Themen mit thematischen Unterkonferenzen mit reinzunehmen in die vielfältige Veranstaltung Republik. Heute und, das auch was Neues, morgen die Re-Campaign zum ersten Mal. Hier freut es mich, verkünden zu dürfen, genau wie die Republik auch ausverkauft. Es war eine tolle Idee. Ich weiß gar nicht, wann wir die gehabt haben. Man hat die gehabt, irgendwann Anfang des Jahres, relativ kurzfristig also, zu sagen, ein thematischen Track für Non-profit-Organisationen, für NGOs, für Leute, die sich engagieren, zu vernetzen zusammen, zu versuchen, die besten Ideen auszutauschen, zu diskutieren. Deswegen halte ich mich hier ganz kurz, damit ihr möglichst viel Zeit habt, heute und morgen. Besonders gespannt bin ich ihr auf morgen, Barcamp, Workshops richtig anpacken. Viel Spaß. Herzlich willkommen vom Re-Campaign-Team. Wir sind jetzt nur beide erst einmal, weil wir euch heute durch den Tag moderieren. Daniel Kruse und ich, Judith Orland. Aber es gibt noch ganz viele andere Leute, die mit so einem schönen T-Shirt rumlaufen. Und die könnt ihr dann ansprechen, es sind alles die Leute, die uns mitgeholfen haben, auch die Re-Campaign zu machen. Wir freuen uns natürlich ganz besonders, dass wir ein Teil dieser Republiker sein dürfen und sein können. Und dass die Republik auch dieses Thema wichtig nimmt und ernst nimmt. Wir hatten uns das Motto gesetzt, die besten Kampagnen im Netz, wie Andreas es ja auch schon erwähnt hat, passiert relativ viel, aber von unserer Seite haben wir gedacht, wir brauchen noch ein bisschen mehr Austausch. Und vor allen Dingen Best Practice-Bauspiele sind da immer sehr hilfreich. Und wir möchten in diesen nächsten zwei Tagen mit euch diskutieren, wie diese vielfältigen Möglichkeiten, die das Netz und heutzutage bietet, auch für die NGOs gut nutzbar gemacht werden können. Mehr und mehr NGOs nutzen ja das Netz. Sie bloggen, sie twitteren, sie machen eine Facebook-Gruppe, etc. Richtiges Standards haben sich noch nicht wirklich entwickelt, zumindest würde ich das so sehen. Aber das können wir auch noch gerne diskutieren. Im Vergleich zu Amerika oder zu England sind wir hier in Deutschland eigentlich am Anfang. Und auch das kann sich ändern. Hoffen wir, dass sich das ändern wird. Deshalb auch noch einmal genauer Best Practice-Angucken aus der ganzen Welt. Auch was können wir davon lernen, auch für uns hier. Heute Vormittag geht es eher um allgemeine größere Fragen nach Netzaktivismus, nach ein bisschen Kultur, nach Online-Strategien. Am Nachmittag wird es dann konkreter in Workshops. Da geht es um ganz konkrete Fragen wie verbinde ich on- und offline, welche Werkzeuge habe ich zur Verfügung, was ist mit Fundraising sehr mein sehr wichtiges Thema für NGOs, aber auch Community Management, was brauche ich dafür, wie mache ich das am besten. Und morgen hat Andreas ja auch schon erwähnt, wenn wir dann barcampig, und das wird dann eher sehr hands-on und interaktiv. Und da seid ihr vor allen Dingen gefragt. Das ist auch überhaupt das ganze Ziel der Re-Campaign. Wir wollen letztendlich eine Basis schaffen für einen offenen Austausch. Und ihr seid die Re-Campaign. Also, beteiligt euch, macht mit, vernetzt euch. Ich weiß nicht, ob ihr bei der Einlass alle so ein grünes Band bekommen habt. Das sind alles, die bei der Re-Campaign auch speziell dabei sind. Guckt danach, fragt die Leute, tauscht euch aus. Das wäre sehr schön. Wir würden uns total freuen, wenn wir am Ende da zwei Tage mit vielen neuen Ideen nach Hause gehen und neue wertvolle Tipps bekommen haben, wie wir das in unsere eigene Kampagne in Arbeit umsetzen können. Jetzt übergebe ich an Daniel, der noch ein paar einleitende Worte sagen wird, und auch noch mal ein bisschen was zum organisatorischen. Ja, auch wunderschön. Guten Morgen. Schön, dass ihr da seid. Sehr schön, dass wir ausverkauft sind. Ich möchte noch mal betonen, gleich beim ersten Mal. Ich habe von der Republik ja auch furchtbar wenig gesehen, was ich zum Glück gesehen habe, weil Jeff Jarvis, amerikanischer Blogger und Journalist, da wollte ich noch mal kurz einsteigen. Er hat über Privatsphäre geredet und Publicness, also Öffentlichkeit. Und dass wir im Moment viel darüber reden, dass Facebook und Google und diese alle heißen unsere Daten klauen, dass aber niemand mehr darüber redet, was das Netz uns gibt, nämlich eine große Öffentlichkeit. Ein paar Beispiele davon sind vielleicht die sogenannte Twitter-Revolution im Iran, wo soziale Medien das letzte freie Medium waren, was die Menschen benutzen konnten, um sich zu beteiligen. Es gibt im Moment ein Riesenssocial Media-Thema, das wir hoffentlich heute noch hören, von Greenpeace gestartet gegen Nestle mit einem Video und vielen anderen Themen, wo wirklich mal so ein Thema sehr gut durchgebrochen ist, auch in die großen Medien. Man kann auch nennen den Firewall in China oder eben auch, was viele Republikanhänger bekämpfen, eben die Datensammlung der Bundesregierung. Also das sind so Sachen, die es auch zu verteidigen gilt, glaube ich, bei dem Thema. Okay, ich kann mir den Teil Republikas bauen, das hat Andreas sehr schön gemacht. Vielen Dank nochmal, dass wir hier sein dürfen, mitmachen dürfen. Heute, ganz wichtig, wenn ihr auf das Programm schaut, haben wir ja auf unserem Recompane-Abschnitt, könnt ihr unser Programm noch mal sehen. Das Programm, viel halt ist schon in den Händen, ist auch noch mal schön ausgedruckt, mit ohne Internet unten am Infopoint in der Launch zu erhalten. Da gibt es viele weitere schöne Sachen. Ich freue mich selbst über den von uns kleinen, hergestellten Social Media-Leitfaden. Der ist extra sozusagen für euch entstanden, ein bisschen, den kann man sich da mitnehmen. Und andere Medien, unser Medienpartner. Noch mal zur Republikan, heute sind wir noch parallel, die haben den letzten Tag, wir haben den ersten Tag, morgen sind wir sozusagen unter uns. Das heißt aber, dass ihr tendenziell auf allen Veranstaltungen der Republikan Zugang habt. Und wenn alle 250 da sind, dann wird es auch nicht allzu unengen, sag ich mal, in unseren Räumen. Wir sagen euch nach den ersten zwei Reden noch, wo ihr dann rübergehen müsst, das findet dann alles über den Hofstart. Heute früh bleiben wir erstmal hier vor Ort. So, was haben wir dann noch? Eine nette Sache ist, wir haben uns ein Stream gebaut, die jetzt noch nicht so tief sind im Thema, die müssen jetzt sehr gut aufpassen. Also das heißt einmal, dass wir mit dem Hashtag RC10 und mit dem Hashtag re-Campaign, könnt ihr auf Twitter landen und dann sieht man dies hier nochmal. Die URL kann man sich jetzt hier oben abschreiben. Auf Flickr gilt das Gleiche, man merkt hier, das ist ein kleines Autogib namens RC10. Deswegen scheint das da auch, das wäre gut, wenn wir da schnell vernünftige Fotos drüberladen. Also wenn ihr irgendwas knipst, helft uns mit bei der Dokumentation. Bei YouTube und bei Flickr gelten die Schlagworte re-Campaign. Man sieht hier ein gutes Branding, denn es gibt kein einziges YouTube-Video auf der Welt, bis jetzt mit re-Campaign. Ihr könnt die allerersten sein. Ja, ich glaube, dann habe ich meinen Teil auch. Und ich komme schon zum Gerd, oder? Passt du noch was? Ich habe noch was Kleines. Und zwar wurde die Re-Campaign organisiert von Oxfam Deutschland, der Agentur Nest, der Veranstaltungsreihe Socialbar. Was ich in unserem Stream ist, sind wir da auch alle schön nochmal mit Logo vertreten und der CSR Beratungsagentur Making Sense. Wir haben natürlich auch ein Medienpartner. Danke, dass du mich an die Partnerin hast. Die haben wir jetzt leider nicht mehr auf Bildschirm, aber das sind das vor- und nachhaltige Wirtschaften, der Block Reset To. Ich glaube, Block schränkt es nicht zu sehr ein, das Online-Magazin Reset To und Politik und Kommunikation auch da liegen, wie gesagt, die Ausgaben unten aus. Ob Reset To noch ein Flyer hinlegt, weiß ich nicht. Ich habe sie drum gebeten. Ja, nein? Gut. Doch, ja. Bestens abgesprochen. Also, Gad Loving sitzt hier, hält unsere erste Keynote. Sein Titel ist Netzkulturen und Gegenöffentlichkeit. Das stand in Englisch da drin. Ich glaube, Gad, you speak English as well. Das ist vielleicht noch ein wichtiger Hinweis. Wir haben die meisten Vorträge in Deutsch. Einige sind Englisch. Wenn sie Englisch sind, dann sind sie meist auch im Programm. Und wir haben keine Übersetzung. Also, wenn es jetzt doch einigen schwerfällt, dann müsst ihr euch jemand mitnehmen, der euch das sozusagen live nochmal übersetzt. Ich habe das mal frei übersetzt. Gibt es ein Leben nach Facebook und Twitter? Gad ist bekannt eher auch als ein Kritiker der Netzkultur. Er fragt sich auch, ob diese sozialen Netzwerke eigentlich die richtigen sind für die Mobilisierung gerade für NGOs, wie man sie nutzen kann oder welche andere Netzwerke soziale Bewegungen brauchen könnten, um besser ihre Botschaft zu vermitteln. Er ist Professor für neue Medien an der Uni Amsterdam, Gründer des Institute of Network, Kultures, das sich eben mit den Pulsialen für ökosozialen Wandel durch neue Medien auseinandersetzt. Außerdem hat er zu tun mit dem Schlagwort tactical media. This modern form of activism can be recognized by its use of current technology and its hit and run tactics, media campaigns, short-lived in nature. Wikipedia hat gesagt, dazu gehören zum Beispiel auch die Yes-Man, die alle in den Norden und anderen erkennt, also die etwas kreativeren Versionen des Aktivismus. Gut, also wo fahren die partizipativen Vorteile an, wo wird es mit dem stolzen Verlinken zu viel, wie er in seinem Buch Zero Comments beschrieben hat und was davon können NGOs gebrauchen? Herzlich willkommen, Gerd Loving. Das Wort hat Herr Loving. Herr Loving, vielen Dank. Das Wort hat Herr Loving. Herr Loving, vielen Dank. Guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren. Diesen Vortrag wird auf Englisch sein. Ich weiß nicht, warum es sich so recht wird. Aber gut, das haben wir nun einmal vereinbart. Mir ist es egal, aber weil es nun einmal so ist, ich weiß es auch nicht. Ich weiß nicht, ob das eine Schicksalsache ist oder es hat wenigstens von mir aus nichts mit Politik zu tun oder mit Sprachpolitik. Das Netz ist da gut. Also, guten Morgen, everyone. Diesen Vortrag wird in Englisch sein. Ich bin sehr glücklich, dass ich der erste Spieler in diesem Event sein kann. Ich habe viele persönliche und historische Tatsache auf dieses Thema gearbeitet. Ich habe die Beziehung zwischen Aktivismus und der Medien für mindestens 30 Jahre gearbeitet. Ich bin sehr engagiert in den Sozial- und Mobilitätern. Ich habe detectors春ayanisch viel be��ten, radio Berlin sei eines meiner Kes 했는데, und davon bin ich in diesen Northernen noch dabei. Natürlich den ersten 현 Corona Umwelten fließt mit der Öffentlichkeit der Weltweite Web und so weiter. Das ist meine ständige Position seit 2004, als ich aus Australien zurück kam. Ich hatte eine unerwartete Möglichkeit, meine eigene Forschungsinstitut zu haben. Es ist ziemlich klein. Wir sind nur zwei Menschen, und wir haben versucht, viel zu machen, mit wenig Geld und aus dem Quadratum kommen. Ich weiß genau, wie man das tun kann. Mit der kleinen Geld können wir viele Projekte machen. Die meisten sind etwas verabschiedet, und ich habe das mit den anderen formuliert, mit den anderen in den 90ern im Konzept der Taktikmedien. Es begann in 1993, nach dem Fall der Berlin-Wahl, in der Mitte der Balkanwahl, und viele Veränderungen in der Gesellschaft, gegen die Globalisation der neoliberischen Politik, und der Privatisation, das heißt. Es war ein Teil der großen Veränderungen, auch für unsere sozialen Bewegungen. Wir haben gedacht, dass dieses Konzept der Taktikmedien in den Zeiten sehr gut fit war. Die Idee der Taktikmedien, ist natürlich, dass man für die größten Taktikmedien in der sozialen Bewegung, in dem man immer macht, und dass man, wenn man eine Erregung hat, die unsere Hörungen hat, und was nicht. Die Idee der Taktikmedien ist auch sehr viel mit der Erweiterung der visual- tactile audio-Nahme der Medien. Es bedeutet, dass es nicht mehr, vielleicht in den 70ern und den 80ern, nur ein Tool, das wir benutzen. Wir müssen uns jetzt sehr, sehr bewusst sein, die Spezifikten von diesen Tools. Wir müssen die Spezifikten wissen, wie sie bestmöglich arbeiten. Was das bedeutet, ist, dass wir in diesem Konzept, und mit den Projekten, die wir machen, für die sozialen Bewegungen und die NGOs, empfiesst, diese Medien zu denken, dass wir die Stärken von temporären Koalitions zwischen Aktivisten, Arten und Forschern beenden. Das ist das Kind der Natur der Taktikmedien, dass wir sehr, sehr bewusst sein sollten, die ästhetischen Qualität der Arbeit, die wir machen. Es gibt eine erhöhte Erweiterung der Werte des Design- und visualen Kommunikationen. Es ist nicht genug, nur eine verbindende Messung zu haben, eine verbindende Bildung, eine ursprüngliche Kampagne. Und glücklich sind die Tools mehr und mehr zu viel und für viele, viele Menschen zu arbeiten. In den letzten 90ern, wir haben dann, nachdem wir viel über die Dinge diskutiert haben, natürlich kam die Medien, und das war ein wichtiges Moment, in dem wir alle in 1999, in dem einiges von Gruppen und Koalitions, was wir über die Experimente mit der globalen Stärke entstanden haben. Und die Seattle Riots waren eine Erweiterung, aber auch vor, in den Monaten, war einiges von uns auf die Präparation der Website und der relateden Event. Aber natürlich, wie wir alle wissen, sind wir jetzt ein Jahr weiter, und es gibt viele Flöhe mit dem sehr guten Konzept in der Medien. Nicht nur hat es sich entwickelt, es hat jetzt eine Geschichte, auch hier in Deutschland, aber in vielen Ländern. Nicht alle Storien sind die gleichen, aber wir können sagen, dass diese Art von die Medien, besonders in den Beginn, sehr aufregend war, aber es hat irgendwie viel zu den Problemen, die es hatte. Für den Medien war es immer unerwartet, ob dieses Tool eigentlich für die Aktivisten zu mobilisieren und die internalen Diskussion zwischen den Aktivisten zu verbreiten, oder ob es wirklich ein Tool war, um die broadere audience und die Mainstream-Media zu informieren. Man kann das Anbieter sehen in vielen Websites. Das war eine der Gründe, warum die Medien in der Ende nicht weiter weiter zu entwickeln. Das Konzept des Independent-Media-Zenters, das war entwickelt, das war mit großen Events und Protests aufgeräumt. Es war sehr gut gearbeitet, auf eine temporäre Basis, mit großen Mobilisierungen. Diese Mobilisierungen brauchten eine bessere internalen Kommunikation. In diesen Instanzaturen, die Medien, wie ich dann auf die website but what the media really felt to do is to benefit from it's own diversity. It kind of got stuck there in a way. Maybe you were listening to my speech yesterday, that I gave in the other building where I spoke about the rise of the so called national webs. Imentaター sind auch Talk, war eine seventy-fünfakte samt соглас ohne 1990. Nach dieserLaugh 41 Tom in der Comiciosoordinated mit am Die schauen erstmal die Matte und sich für eine andere professions biliariante Altoèle Rico und sein und effektive Interventions, remain quite successful und quite disturbing. In that also, that they really transcend, let's say, the activist community. They go beyond, let's say, the traditional constituencies of the social movements und really through these very critical interventions reach a really broad audience. What we have also seen in the field is that online activism, activism in general, media activism, tactical media, give it a name, has become a subject of academic research. Of course, this already started in the 1980s and 90s with people studying the kind of the social dynamics of the so-called new social movements. But certainly over the last few years or so we have seen a real rise of kind of a more detailed academic research into what we are talking about here and what we are going to deal with over the next two days. I think it is good to at least be aware that this is going on. From my activist perspective I am always a little bit skeptical about what the academics really contribute but then I am also an activist myself at least recently. At least, this is something to look at. Do you really want to be involved in this? Do you think that long-term academic research will help us any further? Let's just see what we can get out of it. I would certainly like to see a much closer collaboration between these media scholars and you out here. I think that is really important and I think it is not so good to just hide somewhere in a room in some department to do some studies and then to publish a paper. This is in my view not the way to go. This is not the way to do research but I am, to be honest, quite skeptical about that. I think there are much much better and much more involved ways of academics how they can actively contribute and maybe also reflect and critique what you are doing. There is one, we could say one subsection of online activism, one other form of activism that we should of course talk about and that we should involve in our discussions and that is certainly activism. Activism, as it was defined in the 90s, as an active approach to disturb the online communications of big corporations of states and of bodies that try to censor us, that try to crack down. This is a much more active way of disturbance. The critical art ensemble has practiced it. There is the so-called electronic disturbance theater that has developed certain tools and suddenly we should realize that especially over the next two days I would like to emphasize that we should actively build the bridges towards the free software and open source community. This is really, really vital. We cannot just reduce this topic in terms of whether and how you are using Facebook and a few other of these at the moment quite successful corporate communication platforms. It is really important for me and I am going to speak about this more in this presentation because you are playing an active role in the further development of the free software and open source alternatives that are out there. We have to use them, test them, we have to critique them and this is really a unique opportunity to bring people together. This is Ricardo Dominguez. He has been actively involved in a lot of that stuff. At one stage he was also a member of the critical art ensemble. He became a staff member of teaching at the University of San Diego on the Mexican border. Maybe you have heard about this, maybe not, but I would certainly like to draw your attention to this scandal or this case that is building up right now as we speak. A lot of stuff has been happening over the last few weeks or so. Together with his group he has developed this tool, the Transborder Immigrant Tool. It has been covered already a little bit, but I think not enough, because recently he has been running into a lot of legal trouble with his employee, the University of California. We don't know yet how this is going to be played out and what exactly is going to happen in this case, but certainly over the next few months we will see a lot of media attention drawn to this case. Much in a similar way as happened a few years ago with the Critical Art Ensemble, a member Steve Kuetz, who was arrested, because he was himself experimenting with a few of these biotech tools that all these big corporations are using, which we as private citizens are not allowed to freely touch. It's called Transborder Migration Tool. It's quite simple. The tool just helps, you know, with GPS, helps people to point them at temporary floors in the US-Mexican border. It also helps people to find water, in the middle of the desert, it's very hot there. There are lots of people out there that assist migrants in their move. Some people even make this move on a daily basis, because they work in the US and live in Tijuana on the other side. So, yeah, this is a very, very critical tool. You could also say it's a very symbolic action. It's really, with a lot of the tactical media examples, we can really ask, is this really effective or not? Is this just symbolic politics? Or is there more to it? But how symbolic are our actions anyway? So, it goes back to the question of what is a real action and what is a symbolic action. A discussion we, of course, had extensively since the 1970s or 80s. This, of course, again touches on this. Is this tool really meant for migrants? Or is it just meant to disturb the mainstream media, which it has done, of course. So, in fact, in the US, we set that American citizens are assisting, you know, Mexican and Central American migrants to cross the border. This is something that, you know. So, it touches a nerve, of course, in society. Okay. Now, I would like to go to where we are at and what is the topic of today's conversation here. And that is Web2.0. You see all the signs, but we're all kind of, you know, already aware of them. And yesterday, I touched briefly on, you know, my definition of Web2.0, it certainly wouldn't be this kind of collection of corporate websites. For me, Web2.0 simply means, you know, the face of reconstruction of the Internet after the dot-com crash, the rise of popular software that finally works, where you don't need to do a lot of coding, but where you can actually start to work with the actual tools, even if you are not a programmer. So, it's all got to do with the democratization of the media, which also is related to the rise, first of all, of broadband, always on connection, the growing rise of multimedia content, moving images and so on, the general kind of rise of high-speed computers and connections, so on top of that, the kind of, you know, the mobile applications. So, this means that there is an opening up of Internet. Internet is now mainstream, I would say, even here in Germany, it is now the mainstream medium. And the problem is, of course, that print and broadcast media have a lot of difficult time accepting that this is the case, that the actual population, the vast majority of the population is using this medium and that we in fact should no longer speak about new media, that's nonsense, and it's been with us for quite some time, but not only that, you know, the vast majority of people are using it in one way or the other. And yes, that is disturbing. What we see then is, of course, that ever since the 90s, there's a big, big kind of influence coming from the United States, in which certain ideologies, certain discourses kind of are spread, but they are also translated into code, they are translated into network architectures. So, if we are talking about, let's say, the Californian ideology or techno-libertarianism, or if we're talking about the very conservative points of view of Lawrence Lassig and so on, if we're talking about all these kind of very specific, it is more than just an opinion. These opinions, and here you look at Henry Jenkins, he's a big fan of Web 2.0, promoter of not so much political activism, but he's particularly interested in fan cultures, and so he's probably the most well-known of them in that particular field. We always have to be kind of aware that this is a very specific, rather conservative political agenda that comes with it. There's almost no really interesting progressive or emancipatory agenda attached to this. And from a perspective of social movements, this is at least something, you need to be very aware of, that we should maybe try to disconnect that very specific ideology, that in the 90s of course caused the whole dot-com boom and then the dot-com crash, and then reconstructed itself over the past few years into the so-called Web 2.0, that this agenda should be disconnected from the actual applications that we use. And this is of course what a lot of activists kind of struggle with. I like the functionalities of Facebook, but I don't like Facebook, the company, right? It kind of sums it up. Yeah, but how can we do that? Und es start probably with just a growing awareness of the very, very specific political agenda of these so-called technical evangelists. And Jeff Jarvis of course is one of the main evangelists these days, and you have heard him speak maybe on Wednesday or yesterday. It's a very specific agenda. And yeah, I would say that we need to kind of formulate our own agenda. And this is what I hope that will be one of the outcomes of this summit, where you come together, maybe also in these initial meetings, kind of say, okay, let's not only design clever campaigns, but let's go beyond that. Let's create some tools that a lot of people will be able to use over time. Now, this is for me a very inspiring website. And if you want to really engage into this topic, how do activists deal with or not deal with or relate to Web2.0. This is for me at least the best site. It's a very recent one. It's only started, I don't know, two years ago, DigiActive, a world of digital activists. And yeah, it's one of the sites that, it's something, or you could also say, well, this is something that in the media should have done, but it's not really doing, to have that kind of explicit clash of cultures. Yes, we want to use it. How do we use Twitter and so on. But also, what are the downsides of it? At what point do we bring activists in danger? And this is something we need to talk about. This is kind of how, according to DigiActive, kind of the world of digital activists looks like. And I really like it because it comes, in fact, quite close to what I mentioned earlier about the coalition between artists, activists and researchers. Here you can kind of see something similar, where people, the programmers are also very much involved, as builders, builders of websites. People that do, they're probably more the traditional activists. And the thinkers there, probably most of you, maybe are in the thinkers. Or, I don't know, that would be curious to find out if that's the case. Probably a lot of you will kind of bring home new ideas from this conference. So you probably, or maybe you're even in the middle somewhere. Also, interesting, that they mention entrepreneurs there. I think there is also a site to that, which, to be honest, I don't really mind. I think that's, in theory, that's a good thing. And if you were around yesterday at my talk, you might remember that I'm really emphasizing that in this world we should also think about how to maintain certain levels of professionalism, that we should be skeptical about the praisl of the amateurs, and that we should at least think, how programmers, activists, designers and a lot of other people in this field can somehow make a living over the long term. Und das ist, wie NGOs in meinem Verhandlungen sind, organisational Lefthofen von sozialen Träumen. Die sozialen Träume sind passiert, und die NGO ist ein organisationaler Residium. Die sind nicht in der Mitte des Bluts, sie sind nicht nur selbst präsentiert. Es gibt viele Leute, die zusammenkommen und sagen, dass sie nicht wollen, dass sie wirklich gehen wollen. Sie wollen es in eine viel mehr strukturelle, besser Art. Und das ist das, wie NGOs in der Mitte sind. Das ist das, was ich sage. Ich glaube, dass wir viel mehr auf die Beziehung haben. In meiner Meinung nach, das ist mein persönlicher Hinweis, oder ein theoretisches Wort. Aber es ist sehr wichtig, wenn wir über Web 2.0 sprechen, zu halten, dass die Probleme der Bewegungen erst kommen. Wir haben keine organisierte Frage, wie die NGOs das tun. In meiner Sicht ist es eine Primärzeit der sozialen Bewegung. Und alle anderen folgen nach dem anderen. Wenn es keine sozialen Bewegungen gibt, um eine ursprüngliche Sache zu kommen, ist es sehr schwer, es organisieren zu können. Es wird auch ein bisschen fragilierbar. Das wäre mein Thema heute, mein zentraler Thema für diese Lektion. Es ist nicht geäußert, um Web 2.0 zu utilisieren, wenn es keine aktive soziale Bewegung gibt, um die Frage zu behalten. Man kann nicht das Lack der Erholung von diesen Tools utilisieren. Die Tools, in meiner Meinung nach, sind meine zentralen Debatten. Meine Kontribution für diese Konferenz ist, dass Web 2.0 zu Ende der Tradaktur und nicht zu Beginn kommt. Es ist sehr interessant, dass wir das in diesem Website, das DG Active, eine reale Bewegung und eine Diskussion dieser genannten Generation haben. Viele sind jung und sehr konzentriert, vor allem in Klima- und auch in vieles anderes. Das ist eine Art Ressenkung, dieses Moment, in dem in einem bestimmten Struggle die Web 2.0 Tools werden, und wirklich etwas, was passiert, und in dem es nur eine Art Medienaktivität, Sozialerweihung gibt. Aber für die lange Mikroerweihung, was ist das? Man kann viele Tools entwickeln, Konzept für das, wie das Mikroaktivismus gebetet wird. Es gibt viele, die negativ sind, über solche Entwicklungen. Hier sehen wir die Examples, das DG Active Website und ein Handbuch für Facebook-aktivismus mit dem Sieg, ein paar wirklich influenzialen Examples, das ist eine. Es gibt viele mehr, eine war nur erwähnt, die Greenpeace Nestle-Kampagne, die ich denke, ein neues Level, online-aktivismus, das ist ein guter Sinn. Viele haben es vielleicht auch über die letzten paar Monate gelernt. Aber das Umwelt ist auch verändern. Hier sehen wir, was sie sagen, über die Veränderung der Privatspolicen und der Fasen-Facebook, die DG Active Website, für die Entwickler, für die allzu klarer Was sie für stehen und was sie sich für ihre Netzwerke übernehmen. Das wird ziemlich schwierig. Man möchte es als Tool nutzen, um viele neue Menschen zu erreichen. Man möchte nicht, dass man die eigenen sozialen Netzwerke aus dem Bolden nehmen. Das wäre das Ziel. Das wird zum Beispiel approached und ernteger 1995. Sie sein Man weiß auch, was andere über dich finden. Und ist das wirklich, was du willst? In general, ja. Aber natürlich gibt es immer die Web2.0-Susside-Maschine. Es war, dass es jünglich verbitten wurde und es verbrannt wurde. Es wurde von Worm und New Media-Initiatives in Rotterdam, in den Netherlands, und Facebook ist jetzt versucht, dass niemanden der Aktivitäten der Maschine-Susside-Maschine mehr mehr Influenz hat als Facebook. Man muss sich davon bewaren, dass es increasingly schwierig wird, um zu erheben, was du machst. Man kann nicht sagen, dass man eine Campaign machen würde, und dann wird man sie erheben. Dann wird die Information dort bleiben. Es ist v.a. Facebook sehr schwer für individuelle<|ar|><|transcribe|> zu erheben, um die Aktivitäten zu erheben. Es ist die nächste zu unbezirklich. Als Citroen destimey. Ich habe heute ein paar von meinem Gespräch mit Nicolas Carr, den Wettbewerb von Jeremy De Nier, aber er ist derjenige, der originally from Belarus ist, in den USA, der ein wirklich, wirklich guter Netzaktivist-Kritik ist. Ich kann hier sehr viel seine Website und seine Worte anrechnen, weil er wirklich unsere wenige Spots zeigt. Er ist nicht so ein cynischer Typ, also ich denke, er ist wirklich mit den besten Intentionen, aber die Menschen, die wir brauchen, brauchen wir unsere eigenen Kritik. Es ist eine sehr schwierige Frage. Hast du Twitter, für Beispiel, wirklich effektiv in Iran? Ja, so ist es. Hast du es geheim? Hatten die Leute in den Jail oder die Todesenten zu gehen, hat es sich mit der Wettbewerb in der Mobilisation und der interne Kommunikation gehalten? Ich bin mit Morozov und anderen sehr skeptisch über das. Ich denke, wir sollten sehr, sehr vorsichtig sein, weil wir uns auch mit Twitter, für Beispiel, in den Städten, in den Aktien, sehr gefährlich sind, weil es sofort geäußert wird. Das ist natürlich eine seiner Stärke, aber auch du machst dir sehr, sehr wunderbar. Er hat auch viele verschiedene Besteile geschrieben, und der Fall von der so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova ist eines der Besteile. Ich denke, der Iran-Kassel ist noch unresolved. Ich würde mich wirklich, wirklich sehr gerne über diese Details und Studien zu reden, weil es, wenn es so passiert, hatte ich die Perspektive, dass, besonders wegen der amerikanischen politischen Politik, sehr viel als ein Hapt-up-Item in den News gepostet wurde. Es gab eine bestimmte politische Agenda, und nicht genau die Leute in Iran, sondern die Leute, die in sehr großer Gefahr waren, waren in den Bergen von Iran und elsewhere. Von einer aktivisten Perspektive war es zumindest ein dubioses Ding. Wir haben viele Darstöne gemacht. Ich liebe diese Foto sehr, weil sie ihr mobile Phone in ihrer linken Hand hält. Es gibt eine Menge Kraft, die aus diesen bestimmten Ausbursts, die wir sehen, im ganzen Welt, passieren. Sie sind oft ziemlich breif, haben diese Tage Social Protest, sind oft sehr breif, sehr breif, aber sehr breif. Und das geht zusammen mit der Tendenz gegen die Real-Time-Media, die ich vorhin über gesprochen habe, und die viele in dieser Konferenz sprechen. Die Social-Unrestung wird schneller, aber auch, wie Sie es sagen, wird eine kurze Zeitung der Zeit mobilisieren. Vielleicht ist das auch etwas, das Sie wissen, und wir wissen alle, was das in der Campaign-Design ist. Wir brauchen viel Zeit, um die Campaigns zu entwickeln, aber die Campaigns werden ausgelöst und werden in einem sehr kurzen Zeitpunkt passieren. Und wenn sie aufgenommen sind, können sie wirklich in Stunden gelassen. Ja, wirklich. Und diese Verkaufung des Zeitungs ist eine reale Konzerte, besonders für die Aktivisten, weil sie weniger Zeit haben, um die Konzerte zu erinnern, um die Argumente zu kommunikieren. Und mehr und mehr Erfassungen werden in die Symbolik der Medien, in die Images, gehen. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich Zeit habe, die die... Okay, das ist ein wirklich inspirierender Video, das Sie wirklich versuchen, Ihre Hände zu bekommen und zu Ihrer Gruppe oder Ihre Konstituenz zu zeigen. Es ist 10 Taktik, es wurde von Taktik.tech.org entwickelt. Ihr könnt es auf der Internet finden, durch den URL, der ist Informationactivism.org. Diese Leute haben auch für die letzten 10 oder 15 Jahre dieses Kindes gemacht und haben ein schönes 1-Hhour Video gemacht. Und sie haben die Taktik, ihre Vorbereitung auf Sie alle, weil es primär alle Menschen targetiert, bei dieser Audience. Das ist ein Video, das für Sie auch sehr wichtig ist. Und es ist 10 Taktik, ich habe sie hier auf dem Internet listed. Sie mobilisieren Leute, wischen und rekordieren, visualisieren Ihre Message, ich habe darüber gesprochen, die wichtigsten Ästhetik zu verweisen. Sie veröffentlichen persönliche Storien, add Juma, das ist ein wirklich taktisches Medien-Schlecht, von Yes-Man und so weiter. Sie veröffentlichen und veröffentlichen, das ist ein Wikileaks, das war mit dem, was ich gestern gelandet habe, wie man komplexe Daten benutzen kann. Das ist das ganze Problem, was ich gesagt habe, auch über Infovisualisation. Man hat weniger Zeit, um mehr komplexe Themen zu kommunikieren. Es gibt Werte, die mit diesem Problem verursachen. straight team intelligence, let people ask the questions, manage your contacts. Okay, ich will briefly look at each Entkn치는, Ich möchte Ihnen eine Idee des... Okay, das ist ein Sound. Es geht um neue Spaces, die sich auf die Internet und auch die neuen Medien eröffnet haben. Auch die größten Formen von digitaler Technologie, wie das Video oder andere Plattformen, die online verabschiedet sind. Es muss ein E-Centre sein, ein Teil sein. Es muss auch ein strategisches Verhandlungen sein. Tocher Grimes war oft im TV mentioned. Tocher Grimes hat es mir geholfen. Ein Projekt, das mit dememas NYU ge Politik hat, die im previousen Ozern-Fahrtánhsam Christian Quhhh murte. Die js 바� und organisieren die Arbeit und facilitieren die Verkaufung später. Die Fakt, dass 700 Leute zusammengekommen sind und die Rallye ausgesucht haben, war eine der größten Impacten, die wir haben. Mit den Menschen, die viel über die gefährliche Dinge machen, wie Diktatorship, Impression, Santership. Das ist wie eine Narrative Plattform, um einen realen Bewegung zu bauen, der die demokratische Reform der Welt beobachtet. Es ist wichtig, dass wir alle diese neue Spaces nutzen, um unsere Faszination zu machen. Okay. So, ihr könnt Kontakt, Taktik, und das Video von ihnen kommen. Ja, natürlich ist das Avaz sehr gut bekannt. Es ist der größte Webseite für Online-Petitionen. Es gibt einen lokalen National-Online-Petitionen-Sitz. Ich bin nicht bewusst über den, der in Deutschland meistens ist. Aber es ist etwas, was ich etwas über es übernehme. Ich denke, es funktioniert sehr gut, wenn eine Campaigne wirklich auf die Weise ist. Aber um zu bemerken mit schwierigen Problemen in der Beginn, die Online-Petitionen nicht funktionieren. Wenn du dich für die Tagessignal aufsetzen willst, solltest du am Ende der Zeit einer Campaigne, wenn du schon viele Medienbeziehungen hast, dann kann das funktionieren. Ich möchte hier einen Punkt an den Zukunft sehen. Der Zukunft für mich ist ein Weg von den corporate-Plattformen, wie Twitter und Facebook, um die Social Media als ein Tool zu sehen. Das ist, glaube ich, was sie damals im Entwicklung sind. Sie sind temporär, sie sind große Plattformen, die uns die sozialen Logik und die Möglichkeiten der Möglichkeiten haben, aber eventuell Facebook, wie viele andere von diesen Seiten, wird krummel, fragmentiert, fallen. Das ist einfach, weil die Menschen sich auf ihre eigenen Websites auf die eigenen Tools befinden, um ihre speziellen Audienz zu erreichen. In diesem Fall sind sie in Kontrolle über die Settings, über die Privatschien, und so weiter. NING ist ein sehr gutes Beispiel für das, wo es geht. NING ist ein Hybrid, das wurde im Moment geplant. Es war von der Nettscape-Foundar, Marc Andreessen, er ist noch sehr viel von uns in der Lage. Es ist ziemlich erfolgreich und es zeigt uns, wo die Social Media als Tool geht. Das ist ein sehr guter Schritt, wo die Menschen viel mehr Kontrolle haben über diese sensiblen Probleme. Wer kann finden, was wir tun, wer wir uns ermöglichen? Wie können wir das kommunizieren? Ja, und ich denke, das ist gut. Wenn Sie Sie gerne mit dem Experiment mit versuchen wollen, bitte machen Sie das. Denn es zeigt Ihnen etwas, wo es geht. Aber das ist in meinem Vortrag, wo es wirklich geht. Es ist eine Initiative von riseup.net, die amerikanische Grasroutesorganisation. Und Krabgrass sagt, dass es völlig open ist, es ist eine freie Software, eine open Source. Ihr könnt es installieren auf Ihrem eigenen Server und ihr könnt die ganzen Twitter- und Facebook-Funktionalität haben. Aber ihr seid in Kontrolle. Und es ist noch besser, aber es kommt. Ich glaube, dass es für viele Social-Movements geht. Das ist wirklich das idealste Tool. Und das ist eine Direktion, wo es geht. Vielmehr, wie mit Blogging, wir haben den Weg von Blogger.com, Blogspot.com usw. as a tool, that you install yourself. This is eventually also what's going to happen with social media. From my perspective, what we have been doing over the last few years is that we've developed, further developed this concept of organized networks. I've been shying away a little bit to organize yet another kind of tactical media reunion event of my specific generation. I'm not so interested in that kind of next five minutes. It was influential, it was four huge events that happened. But I think it's better to move on. And the concept of organized networks I think is much more promising in that way. Because it tells us something about how people prefer to do activism these days. And we're not in offices, not in huge kind of NGO structures, but networked. But the problem is of course with networked is that we face this problem of the so called weak ties. People have not enough commitment. And this is not because they are lazy or because they don't like you or no, but also because the technical infrastructure is such that all these social media that are around are in fact promoting weak ties. They are not promoting for you to get better organized. There's a whole reason why that is the case. I'm not going to talk about that so much in the history of weak ties. But okay, this is kind of where we are at. Last year we organized a big event in Amsterdam called Winter Camp, where we invited 150 artists and activists to work with one week for us. So if you want to know more about this whole issue, you can just look for Winter Camp. And I would like to close this presentation with this to me very moving and inspiring. Again, I think a tactical media project is called Tankman Tango, developed by the media activist Deborah Kelly. And what it does is that it has mobilized activists and artists around the world to dance what she called the Tankman Tango. And as you remember, there's the... Here it is. Okay, this is the website. Yeah, the project itself is called Forget to Forget. And it kind of explains here. As you remember, you'll see... Remember 1989, when spring bled into summer in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the gathering of the people turned into a wave, demanding reform, chanting for change. The people's petition against corruption calls for free speech, for collective responsibility, and for democracy echoed round the world. Remember when the government sent the military into the square bearing weapons meant for war? They fired on their own people, turning June 4th into a day of massacre. Remember June 5th, when the tanks rolled again on a defeated Tiananmen Square? A man stood before them, wearing only shopping bags, stopping the tanks advance. He became Tankman. Remember Tankman? As the tanks tried to evade him, he defied them. He dodged, he wove, he stepped up. His actions spoke for the voices of science by force. Dancing the Tankman Tango, we traced his steps. We marked time. We danced him into memory. On June 4th, 2009, forget to forget, do the Tankman Tango. Democracy is never completely one, but must be constantly worked on. Samyat Sen. Okay, thank you very much for your attention. Egal ob Rat almighty,
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What is Web 2.0 anyway? Is it useful to run after the latest hypes of Facebook and Twitter? Are there alternatives? What forms of ‘networking’ could grass roots campaigns and social movements use in oder to broaden and strenghen their political work?
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10.5446/20904 (DOI)
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So questions all pass over to Jeremy. Thank you very much, Monica, for this very precise state of the EU communication law. If there are some further questions afterwards, I think they can be directed to you as well. I will try to talk to you about the current state of the play and the upcoming fights in those issues. I'm Jeremy Zimmerman, I'm the co-founder and spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net. It doesn't work. La Quadrature du Net is a kind of citizen toolbox providing tools for everyone to understand the legislative process when it threatens our fundamental freedoms on the internet and tools for everybody to participate into the public debate. We've been active in France with the notorious ADOPI three-strike slow in the EU with the telecoms package and some other legislative and non-legislative projects. You will understand with this presentation that we are right now active with many issues you can all participate with. One thing I really, really want to show you is a trophy we earned in the French ADOPI battle, the three-strike legislation. We won this and put it on top of the fireplace next to the taxidermized head of former minister of culture, Cristine Albanel. It's a decision by the constitutional court, the highest jurisdiction in France. And it's supposed to say, yes, it says, article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Men and the Citizen of 1789 proclaims, the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of men. Every citizen may thus speak, write and publish freely, except when such freedom is misused in cases determined by law. This is freedom of speech. In the current state of the means of communication and given the generalized development of public online communication services, this is the internet. And the importance of the latter for the participation in democracy and the expression of ideas and opinions, this right implies freedom to access such services. So this is an answer to your question, sir. And it is literally the highest court of a small country named France that links freedom of expression and communication, which is essential for democratic participation, to the access to the internet. You and I, we all know this today. We blog, we tweet, we use the internet to do very interesting participatory stuff. But it is now up to the legislature, to people who write the law and rule our societies to understand it. So when I say this is a trophy, it literally means that we, the people, by campaigning really hard, we can get to reach up to the highest institutions and make them understand our points. So I do share the pessimism of Monica on some aspect of the telecoms package, but on the political side of these fights, I think that there is a lot to play and a lot to win. On the positive aspects of the telecoms package, I will show you in a very minute, there is this whole question. You see the sentence, this right freedom of expression implies freedom to access such services. The question we have to ask now is what is the freedom to access such services? What is the freedom to access to the internet? And what is this internet anyway? Well, part of that reply came in the telecoms package itself. It's article 8.4.g of the Framework Directive, and it says, this is the role of the national regulation authorities. It said national regulation authorities show promote the interests of the citizen of the European Union by interrelia, blah, blah, blah, blah. Promoting the ability of end users, this is us, to access and distribute information or run applications and services of their choice. This is, you may argue this is kind of weak because promoting the ability is not that strong of a wording, but being able to access and distribute information or run applications and services of all choices is freedom to access to the internet. We can call this network neutrality. It's a very basic property of the network that makes it the least common denominator, very simple rules so everybody can interconnect and participate. This is the very rule that makes that there is only one internet for everyone, and that everyone can participate in this internet. This is what we cherish and love. This is the internet. So, come on. Knowing this, if you're in China and you don't have the freedom to access some information or distribute some information of your choice, then this is not the internet. This is the Chinternet, so to say. If you're on a mobile network, whatever, providing some so-called mobile internet, well, if your contract says, oh, you will not use voice over IP, Skype thing, you will not use peer-to-peer or whatever news group. Well, this is not the internet. This is OrangeNet, VodafoneNet, whatever net. Most of it may be interconnected to the internet, but this is not the internet. So, the question we have to face now is who has an interest into turning the internet into a whatever else net? And how are they doing it? And what can we do about it? So, we'll try to seek answers to those. So, you might have seen this image from Marvin Tocque before. I like it very much to explain what the operators themselves might be tempted to do with the internet. Oh, you see, it's very cheap and so convenient for people who don't have enough money and think of all the old people who don't want the torrents and so on. You got the basic packages, $29.99, and you got Disney, ABC, you got also MSN and so on. So, you can be happy about it. But if you're not happy about it, you pay the $39, which is a reasonable price, and you got the Wikipedia, ultra leftist, fundamentalist, birdie things, you know? The Google and the Yahoo. And if you pay some more, $49, you got the blogger, YouTube, and you can publish stuff. And you see the fine prints in the bottom, full internet access available on requests, please. Always have to read the fine prints, you know? So, this sounds a bit like science fiction, but as I told you on the mobile phone, internet access, a market today, such restrictions apply. Not as clear with this site is blocked. It's more subtle on some, most of the French subscriptions, I think. They say, oh, you got unlimited internet access, but only 10 megabyte of email. And afterwards, each megabyte of email, you know? So, one megabyte of email is not equal to one megabyte of YouTube. The funny thing is, if you access your email through Gmail, they will never know it's email. But that's another technique. So, an incentive for restricting internet access in order to create new business models. You may think it's just dumb. You would be right. You may think it's also dangerous. Then you would be right again. But if we think about it on a more global scale, it can have an impact on the very growth of this whole common infrastructure we call the internet. And I will explain why just after a sip of this. I'm very sorry. The business model and the investment model of internet operators so far has been to look at those very nice graphs. Some of you might know MRTG and such thing. So, you see what your users are doing on a statistical perspective. And you see that, oh, soon we will hit the floor of the tube. Therefore, we need bigger tubes. And so, the people from the technique go to the people from the money and say, we need a bigger tube. And so, for 20 years from bigger tubes to bigger tubes, from more usage to more usage, we built the internet. This is the organic growth of this common infrastructure with minimum rules where everybody can participate. Now, imagine that the technique guy go to the business people and say, we need bigger tube. But you know, the business guy is smarter than everybody. So, he thinks, hmm, what if we don't buy the bigger tube? People will be annoyed. Things will go slow. And then, we can sell them the magic option. The magic option is being sold right now by Vodafone in Spain on some mobile internet access. If you pay whatever amount of euros a month when the network is congested, you won't be subject to congestion. Yes, yes, they can. So, what does it mean? It means that for everybody else, it will be slower. Therefore, everybody else will have an incentive to buy that option. And when everybody will have voted the option, what they will have is exactly what they had before. So, in term of business, it might be clever. But it means that they have a clear incentive to stop investing in the infrastructure that we also built. We build what is inside. We also build the internet. Therefore, we have to reclaim this. If you don't invest in the infrastructure, we won't use your service again. And this is what we can do about it. As soon as you see such conditions applying to contracts, as soon as it stops smelling like the internet, blog about it, tweet about it, make a fuss about it, contact the press, do everything you can about it, we have this power still. Okay, so this is one very heavy trend right now to restrict fundamental freedom of expression on the internet by restricting access. Another one, Monica quickly talked about it, is the stupid war on sharing. You know, everybody knows that when you share files, you make the industry lose money. Ask a kid with 5,000 movies on his hard disk if he wouldn't have bought 5,000 DVDs. Isn't that obvious? Sure, therefore you can prove it. Well, I won't enter into this debate because it's very trollogen. But anyway, studies from the Ministry of Industry of Canada, studies from the government of Netherlands, studies from the OECD, studies from academics in Britain and in the US, a poll from Ipsos, Germany in eight European countries, a recent note from the US government, all come to the same conclusions. The figures of the industry about whether or not those evil pirates are harming the children are... We don't kill baby seals while sharing files. People who are sharing files are people who buy them more. They might not buy exactly the very same dump copy that they would have bought for 16 euros if they hadn't done it in one click. They would buy a collector edition, a concert, a cinema, tickets, whatever, t-shirt, and overall they buy more in culture. But this is not the debate. The war on sharing is a perfect pretext for those industries who don't want to change their business models, to try to pursue it with everybody else than the only way to make their business is first of all to control the copies, so nobody else than them can do the copies, and to control the means of distribution of the copies. Usually you did it by paying the DJs in the radio, so they put your song first, or you buy advertisement, an advertisement space, or you go to the distribution retail store and pay them to have your CDs in the front rows, or you go to the TV programs to have your stars be in the biggest shows, and so on, and therefore you control the distribution of your works, and everything goes fine in the 20th century. Well, this is over. You all know that. We can all be our own editor, producer, publisher, distributor, whatever. We can. We still can. Because of this very simple thing we were just talking about, that is our freedom to access to unrestricted internet, neutral internet. Well, this one sharing is going on and on. You know that copyright is used as the main Trojan horse for this, Gesundheit, for this strategy of controlling internet like they controlled the previous communication channels, literally to turn this communication tool, or communication tool, into yet another media. Well, will they succeed in turning internet into television 2.0? Well, here comes Europe. You might think I'm obsessed with Mickey Mouse at this stage. Well, I am. There was the telecom's package, but it's not the first time that those questions of content entered the European Parliament. I won't detail the previous IPRED directive. We weren't there at that time. The IPRED 2 directive, we weren't there at that time. That infamous IPRED 2 directive will come back someday in the European Parliament and we'll talk about it later on. For the fun fact about IPR enforcement directives, the IPRED 1 directive, which is about making very harsh civil sanction for anything related to IPR enforcement. Anyone here knows what was the name of the rapporteur of that directive in the European Parliament? Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ding, nobody? Her name was Janély Furtout. She was a member of the European Parliament from the Alde Party and she's the spouse of Jean-René Furtout, who is the president of Vivendi Universal. I like this joke. At the same time, you had Pierre Célal, who was the first European Parliament member of the European Parliament, who was the French permanent representative towards the European institutions in the Council, who is incidentally the husband of Sylvie Forben, who is the head lobbyist for Vivendi Universal. Well, so these things are going on and on and on forever. They have almost unlimited credit for attacking our freedoms and for making their lobbying stuff. Therefore, they use every possible legislative channel they have. This is a massive flooding of legislation that we have to counter every day. But I am not an academic, academics like Monica and I do care a lot about what is in the text. It's very, it's like computer code, you know? If it's broken, it's broken, so we really have to care about it. But it is not the only thing we have to watch. We also have the whole political context that we build around these issues. And as I showed you in the beginning, what we earn with the Adobe P-Fighting Friends shows that we can do it. On a certain extent, if you look at the telecom's package, as it could have been voted in the first reading and what it is now, maybe Monica will agree that it is maybe 20% today of how dangerous it could have been. No? No. We'll debate this afterwards. No, no, all the local content. The part you showed, saying, no, no, saying cooperation with actors in the promotion of local content. In the first version, it was promotion and protection of local content. This makes a lot of difference. And this notion of local content was there 12 times in all the package. Now it's there only once. And some things like this. So we can have moderate victory or damage control losses on the text, but gain huge political victories. And this is what we can achieve altogether by talking about it, blogging about it, tweeting the internet and so on. Right now in the European Parliament is being debated the Gallo report. It's an initiative report, so it's not a legislation, but it's a political message from the European Parliament that will set the course for the future of copyright in Europe. It is reported by Marielle Gallo, who is a French sarcosis member of the European Parliament. She wasn't elected anywhere before. She's the spouse of a notorious writer, and she was the spouse of a minister before and so on. And she was parachuted on the ballots by Nicolas Sarkozy himself, so she's a good little soldier in commanding service right now. She presented this own initiative report. That is the entertainment industry wish list. I encourage you to, it's the letter to Santa Claus. Literally. Yeah. I encourage you to read the draft report. It's quite short. I think it's five or six pages to really see what is the current lingo of the entertainment industry is trying to use copyright to restrict off freedoms on the internet. This lingo included the cooperation of the internet service providers, like when you put a gun on the head of somebody and say, please do cooperate. The extrajudicial litigation and solving of IPR enforcement. This is the bypassing of the right to a fair judicial process. There also is a proportionate sanction, again, extrajudicial. And well, it's a very interesting read. I encourage you also to read the good amendments that were tabled on the Gallo report. We have nothing to do with it. Some MEPs, member of the European Parliament from all parties, table very good amendments that say exactly the opposite. Yeah. One major element in the lingo is counterfeiting. Counterfeiting, you know, those fake medicine, those fake toys from China that blow in the face of little children and so on. Counterfeiting and piracy harms the consumer and kills baby seals whatsoever. So to put counterfeiting, the Chinese factories, the Russian mafia and so on, in the same bag with piracy, what is that? File sharing between individuals with no commercial intent. Yeah, it kills baby seals. Trust us. Well, this is a very interesting fight that is going right now in the European Parliament. You'll see in the very few days if you look on www.laquadratio.net, we'll launch a call for every one of you to take your phone, take your email, contact your elected representatives from the jury commission of the European Parliament, the jury committee, sorry, and tell them there are the good amendments. So please go and vote the good amendments or else. You know, I'm an elector and so on. And so this is an ongoing fight. It will set the course for the next legislative action such as the revival of IPRED II and also very interestingly, it says in its original form, we encourage the ongoing negotiations of the ACTA agreement. Who among you have heard of the ACTA agreement? Wow. I'm impressed. That's a lot. And that's more and more each time. So that's very good news. Well. I'm sorry. That ACTA agreement is a smoking gun. It's a Shakespearean tragedy of the new commons. It's a perfect example of the intent of those industries and the very little consideration they make of us and of our fundamental rights and of that great tool we built together that is the internet. To make it short because most of you know about ACTA already, the official ACTA is anti-country feeding trade agreement. So it's a plurilateral trade agreement. It's not an international treaty. It's not an international agreement because it's not tied to any international institution there is. No WIPO, no WTO, no whatever. So it's the words of the US red representative who represent the US in the ACTA negotiations. The idea was to be between like-minded people. So you take a few friends, you take a nice table, you pick an exotic location, you all sit together and you come with all those nice papers that the industry wrote for you. And it's literally an entertainment industry wish list but in full extent. So we released some leaks. Some leaks were published on our beloved heroes of WikiLeaks and yeah, the agreement has been negotiated in secret for over two years. So all we have to know what is inside is leaks. And so we now have, how do you say, a Facebook preuve. We have quite a bunch of evidence that together show that the most violent criminal sanctions for inciting and aiding infringement. What is this advertisement on your website? What did you say in that comment? Isn't that inciting IPR infringement? No, I'm just expressing my political view that those entertainment industries are assholes so I won't buy their stuff anymore and go to the pirate bay. So very broadly interpreted, words that can be very broadly interpreted and that are voluntarily lived very vague in the text. Civil injunctions that make the industry being able to go to a judge and say, oh, make future infringement on this material to cease. How? Filtering of content on the internet? Automatic removal? We don't know. They don't care. They just want the H bomb against copyright infringement. All this is in ACTA. All this is in what we saw in ACTA. The negotiations are going on today, right today in Wellington in New Zealand. The next round will be in Geneva in June. So we Europeans might have something to play. And here again, it is about awareness. It is about who knows what is going on. And this is how we can really win and defeat the mother f- Defeat the beast. To give a bit of European context, because there was to be the word Europe in my presentation. For Europe, it's the European Commission that negotiate. And the European Commission was a very nice nectar. I tell you, we won't go beyond the EU hockey. The EU hockey is the technocratic name for the EU legislation. We won't go beyond the EU hockey. And which is supposed to be reassuring. But indeed, we will see if they're right or not. Or if their interpretation of the EU hockey matches with ours only when the whole will be signed, which is very, very, very, very, very little margin of maneuver. Well, what we learned recently is that they are negotiating for the EU, but for the criminal sanctions, the most violent and dangerous and broad part of ACTA is not negotiated by them. It's negotiated by the presidency of the Council of the EU. So Mr. Luc de Vigne may have been right when he said, we won't go beyond the EU hockey. Because he leaves this to the presidency. Our unelected representatives of all governments that do it besides here again with no accountability and so on. So my prescription for this is a very high dose of light and exposure. You know, it is called a vampire strategy. You know a vampire in the dark, when you point light on it. So consider that we all have a tiny LED light, a very small one. What we have to do is to light it up at the very same moment and point it towards the same direction. This is what we can do using the internet. This is what we try to help you, to help everyone willing to do so, to do. And I think that this is really what we have to do in order to protect the internet before it's not the internet anymore. Thank you very much. So there were so many trolls in my presentation that I assume there are questions. There are microphones. Just one small thing I didn't really get. You started with the highest court ruling from France that clearly said there is, the internet is part of the freedom of speech regulation. And access should not be limited. And how does this comply with the three strikes rule that you actually have? Sure that you don't want the full details or maybe we can discuss them afterwards. The whole ad-opis was some kind of legal Lego, a huge pile of very dirty Lego. This decision overturned the low ad-opis. So it's a major blow for the French government. And it literally says, as it is part of fundamental rights, you cannot use an administrative authority like the one you designed that will order restrictions of fundamental rights like this. So the government, no, actually Nicola Sarkozy went furious first and is reported to have shouted, this is my law and I will have it. He's also reported that Carla asked him the day of the ruling, but don't they have lawyers in the Ministry of Culture? And that this would have sealed the fate of Christine Albanel, God bless her soul. So he said, this is my law and I will have it. So he ordered the folks in the Ministry of Culture to circumvent that decision of the constitutional council. And so they invented a very light procedure that goes through the judge. The judge is the guardian of fundamental rights and freedom. So the judge can restrict your fundamental freedom. The judge can put you in jail, which is an obvious restriction to your freedom of movement because he's a judge. And so they invented a very express procedure where the judge will rob a stamp, the things. I'll give you the details about you're not guilty of IPR infringement, but guilty of not having secured your internet access against it being used for copyright infringement. Because copyright infringement is a criminal offense that you need evidence to demonstrate prejudice and so on. So this became an administrative offense. The funny thing is the Ministry of Culture now has to publish a list of tools that will allow you to secure your internet access against it being used for IPR infringement, which is very funny because it's not technically feasible. And until they do this, there will be no sanction at all. So for now, Adobe is a lame duck, a dead duck or whatever duck or just dead. So it will not practically be executable? No, it won't. Next question. Show me. I'd just like to come in on where I differed with you just earlier. The two provisions that I... Can you hear me for this one? Yeah, the provisions which I presented are having been through this and spent months and months peeling through the amendments that were presented in the telecoms package and what we ended up with. The ones that I presented were the important ones that the NPA and the IP lobbied for. They are in a very slightly different form from the original form that they lobbied for, but they are actually the important ones. The lawful content, although it would have made things worse arguably, it would have strengthened what they wanted, but the two important provisions were those two and they were in there right at the beginning and they're still there. So that's kind of why I meant I wasn't meaning to be contradictory. There were more than this. There was also the thing about the sending of messages and the type of sanctions and also the fact that the actors interested in the protection of lawful content might not be the same as the one in the promotion. Also the positive parts and overall the political context around it that will guide the interpretation in the member states is at least as important. The political context is very important, but how they will do it, they do it in two. It's so simple. It's amazing. They literally change your contract and they make this general obligation and that's actually all they need to do and that is what is actually quite scary. Are there other questions? Yeah, there is one here. And yeah, this is a very interesting point is that they will use restriction, there's a question, restriction through contract law with ACTA, they will make such a burden on the internet operators up to help them liable for the transmission or storage of copyrighted material that the operators themselves will be forced to implement policies restricting access or publication or so on. So this is a very interesting point is that now they intend to force operators to use contract laws and thank you for reminding me because I forgot to talk about it earlier. So we have to be very, very careful of those contracts and what the operators do and under which pressure. Oh, there would be so many things to talk about how, what can we do positively with the net, but after hearing you and my only question is what are we going to do against the vampires in Geneva in June life? I mean, is there any, I mean, we have to be there and we have to show out because I think that's that put more pressure on them and put so what are we doing against the vampires live in general in June? I can tell you about the state of my reflection on the topic, which is not definitive. And as usually it might be decided in the very few hours before maybe building a nice image of ourselves in front of those big buildings, opaque and close to us being chained to whatever laptop or Mickey Mouse head or looking like we're censored or restricted in any way or and just build images, bring journalists to say, look what we have to show about what they are doing or something like this. I don't believe in huge protests because you know in France we, we do huge protests with millions of people and we cannot achieve that. But building images and spreading them around is a way of giving or or interpretation of the facts. And therefore we write the story. And this is very important. This is what we did on the Adopillo. It was passed in a in a quasi dead form and everybody in France in the general public, you ask, oh, you know the Adopillo? Oh, yes, that dead thing that won't work. Oh, yeah, that thing that is obsolete already. There was an opinion poll asking a representative, indeed, panel, people what they thought about the overturn of the law and 66% of them said, oh, it's a good thing. Have you ever heard of opinion polls about what people think of a decision of the constitutional court of their country? So it really gives an idea on how strong the public debate was on this. So we are building the public debate. We are building the public opinion. We are the public and we are the voters in the end. So I think we should use this kind of tools. Yeah, we're going to Geneva. Yeah, sure. Let's go. Any question? Please. I got three stickers for people asking questions. Very cool stickers. Yeah, Mickey Mouse stickers, indeed. No question? There's one. Thank you. So first I want to thank you and congratulate you with your great work in France, which is really fantastic because France was kind of the cannery in the coal mine. I'm looking for what's going to happen all over the world now. And I think, I guess my question is, you guys have been successful in France because you're a number of talented people. You have all the different mechanisms needed to both do the stuff in the legislative level and also the PR, et cetera. But there seems to be no institution that can match the tenaciousness and the power in the people loving for ACTA, both in Europe but also worldwide. So I guess my question is, how can people unite to get a strength that is equal to that, which is behind ACTA? Thank you. It is a very good and tough question. It's indeed at the heart of our reflection on how to build our action. And on the telecoms package, we have been very successful at communicating what there was to do when there was, it was time to do it and who had to do it and so on. So we build those packaged actions and spread them. Sometimes people think, yeah, it is a good thing to do and just do it. One parameter, and we saw this over and over again and we have difference of interpretation with some people around this, is that I think it's no use to try to centralize the action. We don't want at all to become the center of all this because at some point I will need some vacation badly. The thing is to show people how to do it and at the image of the internet itself, try to parallelize, distribute and explore and exploit the variety. The yes, I'm over time. Yeah. Yeah. Just to finish. Explore the variety of opinions and actions and yeah, use the creativity. And we issued some logos, people remixed them, put them into movies, put them on top of the letters or mail, the sand and so on. So let's reuse collectively all we can produce about it and try to do our best and try to parallelize all tiny LEDs. Uh huh.
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Yet, entertainment industries see the Net as a threat to their existing business models, mostly based on controlling distribution channels of information. Worse, telecom operators see new opportunities in monetizing restrictions to Internet access. The interests of both groups are now converging with the help of a portion of the political class wary of the way the Net upsets their objective of controlling the public sphere so as to retain power. Several legislative projects are contemplating different ways of restricting access to the Net: from the provisions on operators’ contracts in the “Telecoms Package” directives to website blocking in the name of child protection, from the ongoing war against file sharing lead by the entertainment industries in Europe to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently being negotiated at the global level… Restrictions to our access to the Net, from the most obvious (cutoff in the “HADOPI” law in France, censorship in China), to the most subtle (blocking of selected aplications or services, bandwidth prioritization or reduction, etc.) are as many restrictions to our fundamental freedoms, including the most essential freedom of expression. Are these different regulatory projects turning into a global war on the Internet, therefore a war on our freedoms? What is the state of the play? What can we do as citizens?
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10.5446/20893 (DOI)
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Der nächste Redner beschäftigt sich genau mit dem Thema und auch bei seiner Firma Global Voices Online und dem Technology for Transparency Network. Er wird euch neue Wege vorstellen und die Zukunft vorstellen, wie es noch einfacher und intensiver wird, sich in politische Prozesse mit Technologie einzumischen. David Sasaki. Danke. So, this morning, Yavgeny gave a great talk about how governments are using technology to surveil and monitor their citizens. And then Jeff came up after him and he gave, well he managed to invite everybody in this room to hang out with him naked tomorrow. So, if you weren't here for that and if you want to hang out with Jeff Naked, that's your chance. He also managed to give a really good talk about how we can use transparency to benefit ourselves, the values of personal transparency and how we use it to monitor ourselves and to monitor our friends. I want to give a third kind of angle on transparency and that is how citizens are using technology to monitor their governments and to hold their government leaders accountable. Specifically, I want to tackle three questions. I want to ask, what does transparency mean? What are we talking about when we say transparency, especially when it relates to holding government institutions accountable? Two, what does the loss of investigative journalism, which everyone agrees is declining, mean for transparency and for our ability to hold our governments accountable? And three, what is the potential of technology, especially network technologies, to bring about more government transparency and accountability in the future? So, Chapter 1, two false assumptions. I'm going to apologize before I get started on this because I promise I came here to this conference saying that I would say nothing about the 20th year after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Stasi or Americans' favorite movie, The Lives of Others, which I think every American that I know loves. But in fact, the Stasi and the story that's depicted in The Lives of Others perfectly illustrates a tension that has always existed and exists in every society, but is taking new shapes now with the influence of technology. And that's the tension between governments who want to monitor their citizens and citizens demanding more information from their governments. So, the very metaphor of transparency suggests that there is a medium through which we view things and through which others view us. And this metaphor makes the assumption that what is on one side of the transparency medium is conceptually separate, is distinct from what is on the other side. To put it simply, citizens and government are separate entities. The second assumption that it makes is that the nature of what we are looking at through this transparency medium, let's say a glass, doesn't change its nature if we look at it. Of course, both of those assumptions are false. The surveillance techniques of the Stasi are now infamous. I don't think that I need to name them, especially here. But what's interesting is that the Stasi had one spy for every 66 citizens in East Germany. And if you add part-time informants to that formula, then it's one spy for every 6.5 citizens. So, it's actually very difficult to distinguish who is on what side of the transparency medium, because it's dynamic and it's flowing and changing all the time. The Stasi stored huge amounts of information about the citizens of East Germany. It sifted through their garbage, it collected samples of their sheets and underwear to match odors for later times, and most famously, it tapped their phone lines and listened in on their phone calls. The point was to spread fear as much as it was to collect information. But as common as government surveillance was at the time and continues to be today, although it takes new shapes, the fall of the Stasi also illustrates another natural impulse that's been at the heart of investigative journalism since it existed for about the past 200 years. And that is citizens demanding both information and accountability from their government. So, on January 15th, 1990, about 40 years after the creation of the Stasi, a large crowd formed outside of the Stasi headquarters and demanded that the information of the Stasi had been collecting about them as citizens over the past 40 years, since 1950, be handed over. And the Stasi started getting nervous and started shredding the documents. I don't know the story much better than I do. And the process of releasing that information, of making it accessible, is still ongoing today. And it's probably the most painful part I would imagine of German reunification. But it is a fantastic example, an illustration, of a process that's changing and it's happening in a lot of different societies around the world. And that is from a society where government only surveilled its citizens to a society where government and citizens surveil each other, what David Brinn calls the Transparent Society, where we're constantly spying on one another. Chapter 2, from the fourth to the fifth estate, question mark. So, in front of a US congressional hearing, the producer of my favorite TV show of all time, which is The Wire, his name is Dave Simon, he said this, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, without investigative journalists, it's going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician in this country. In his statement to Congress, he held little regard for bloggers. He said that we basically just copy and paste what newspapers have to say and then we maybe throw in sprinkle our own little coffee shop opinions. And that's about it. And so, I wanted to examine his statement to Congress more closely. Is it really true that mainstream journalism prevents corruption from taking place in government? And if so, will that process of holding governments accountable and increasing information about government disappear as those institutions disappear and they are disappearing. I know they're disappearing here, they're disappearing at a faster rate in the United States. So, the best book that I was able to find about this, about the role of media in holding governments accountable and improving governments was published last year, it's called The Public Sentinel by Pippin Norris, she's the editor of it, and it charts the idea of the press as a fourth estate, as an institution that exists primarily to hold institutions and those in power accountable. So, as Thomas Jefferson famously said, and I think this gets at the heart, the idea of the fourth estate, the basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object we should, the very first object should be to keep that right. And we're left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. So, this idea of watchdog journalism, this idea of the press as a democratic institution was built into the founding of the first modern representative democracy. And there are many examples and countless movies of how investigative journalism ensures justice, transparency and accountability. I don't think I need to list all of the cases, Aaron Brokowicz was one that was actually turned into a movie, but based on a true story. And more than just investigative journalism, watchdog journalism also monitors the day-to-day practices of government officials, so that citizens are more informed and can assess their efficacy and their performance. So, watchdog journalism can expose the corruption of traffic policemen, the wrongdoings of a priest, or billion-dollar financial scandals. And the best investigative journalism doesn't just expose corrupt individuals, but entire systems that are flawed and in need of reform. So, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when a lot of countries around the world were moving from authoritarian governments to more democratic styles of governance, a new industry was created called media development. And a lot of this came out of the donor field in the United States and elsewhere. So donors like the Ford Foundation, USAID from the United States government and the World Bank, they started funding projects to create media institutions, and specifically to train reporters and editors in a lot of different countries, especially in the former Soviet Union, in investigative journalism techniques. So it started in the former Soviet Union, it moved to Serbia and the Balkans after the Second Balkans War, and now these projects are very common around Africa and Southeast Asia. But there are a lot of criticisms of media development and of teaching investigative journalism and watchdog journalism as well. Some observers argue, for example, that the adversarial nature of watchdog journalism erodes trust in governments and presents government as more inefficient and wasteful as it really is. Others say that a constant barrage of all of these scandals and corruption stories desensitizes people to actual stories of corruption. So if every single day you see a newspaper article about this or that corruption, you just assume that it's regular practice and when something really comes up, you don't pay much attention to it. There are even suggestions in countries that are new democracies, that by constantly attacking what democratically elected leaders are doing, it erodes trust in democracy. And also, many people in East Asia have said that western style watchdog journalism doesn't lead to the type of social harmony that many East Asian societies value and shouldn't be forced upon them. Despite these criticisms, watchdog journalism still exists. The watchdog journalists are still treated as heroes often and in a noble endeavor. But these watchdog journalists have come up against two major obstacles to their work. And it's changing. The first major obstacle is the state and the second is the market. The state censors their work and threatens their safety. The market demands that they make their work entertaining enough to sell newspapers, magazines and website subscriptions. So a lot of media companies privatize to shield themselves from state censorship. They say we don't want to be pawns of the state anymore so we're going to become private companies only to find that there is no longer a sustainable business model to keep them going. So, rather than paying for newspapers, we have our phones. One of... So this decline in sustainable business model of the private media industry has led to a lot of concern about the idea of the fourth estate and about newspapers as an institution of accountability. But it's also led to a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about the rise of the so-called fifth estate of networked bloggers, of citizen media types, of all of us in our room, in this room, who are using different platforms to try to hold our governments more accountable. And one of those platforms that people are very excited about, especially this week, that's receiving a lot of attention, is called WikiLeaks, which published a video of US soldiers firing on a van that was picking up an injured Reuters Journalist. And it's a site where any citizen whistleblower can unhinsely upload a leaked document that exposes wrongdoing. So this is a video interview on Russia today with WikiLeaks founder Julia Sange. I hope the volume will work on this. What does the release of this video say about the role of your website and websites like that in the media? Are you essentially now the new fourth estate, the watchdogs, so to speak? Well, reporters that don't have new information, to some degree, have nothing useful to say. And what keeps people honest and what keeps our management over civilization going is we understand how the world actually works. So the first step in the fourth estate is to get information out about the real world. The second step is to comment on it and to think about it. But we need sources that can get restricted information out to the public. The restricted information is very interesting economically. So when information is held back by a bank or a Pentagon, an extra attention is used to suppress it. In this particular case Reuters applied for this information, the Freedom Information Act, which spent the last two and a half years trying to get it, and were not able to. Usually that suppression is a result of fear. So in this particular case seems that the Pentagon or the US military at some level was scared of that information coming out because of the reform effect of it coming out. If traditional media, traditional American media, got their hands on this footage, would they air it in its entirety the way that you guys did on your website? What do you think? I don't know, but I don't think so. I think that is quite unlikely. In fact, it seems that a Washington Post reporter at some stage had access to this material. He writes about part of the transcript in one of his book, The Good Soldiers by David Schinkel. But the video didn't come out. It seems he had access to it at some stage. It didn't come out and he didn't really address the issues with the victims. So Julian makes a very important distinction there between the raw source information that reporters use to report on a story and then the contextualization around that source information. In the past, the journalists were the custodians of that raw source information, making sense of it and delivering it to the citizens. Increasingly, all of that source information is being leaked, is being published, sometimes is being released by the government agencies themselves onto the internet. In much more chaotic fashion, it's up to every internet user to make contextualization around the information in order to hold the government leaders accountable. Julian talks about how David Finkel from the Washington Post had access to this video. He made a nice book about the incident. He wrote some stories about it. But it didn't actually lead to much attention. Not nearly as much as the video itself published on WikiLeaks has led. Probably not as much contextualization because in the end lots and lots of people are now doing more research about this. But it is important to note that in the end neither WikiLeaks nor David Finkel have been successful in transitioning this information to accountability over those who were in charge of the situation, those who gave the go ahead to the soldiers to shoot on the van. So we don't know yet if it will lead to more accountability in the future, but it seems like it hasn't gotten there yet. Chapter 3, the role of technology in the transparency movement. So there's also been a lot of attention given to projects like they work for you in Britain, which monitors the work of UK parliamentarians and assemblies, and open congress in the United States, which monitors the work of congress in a lot of detail. There's tons of information out there. Mika Seafrey, who is speaking tomorrow, might talk a little bit about this. But there's been much less attention and research and analysis of similar websites that are cropping up all over developing countries. So, for the past five years I've been working for an organization called Global Voices, which Jeff mentioned earlier today. And we are kind of a journalism review, but for the blogosphere. So we look weekly, sometimes on a daily basis, at the blogospheres of different countries. We translate that material, we contextualize it, so we translate it in English. From English it's then translated into up to 20 different other languages. And during this five years of monitoring the global blogosphere, we've come across a lot of projects, a lot of citizen media and blogging projects, that specifically aim to improve governance. And we document them and we interview some of their project leaders, but we haven't had the time or resources to systematically look and evaluate these projects for impact. What actually happens? Do they improve governance? Is there any impact offline that we can measure? So fortunately we're approached by two different funders, Open Society Institute and the Omed Yahr Network. They're both interested in the role of technology and the transparency and accountability movement. And they gave us some funding to launch the Technology for Transparency Network, which you can find at transparency.globalvoicesonline.org. And the heart of this is we are going to, right now we have 23 projects. By the end of the month we're going to have 40 case studies of technology projects, mostly internet projects in developing countries that aim to promote government transparency, political accountability and civic participation. And we're also going to publish a research paper at the beginning of next month that kind of takes in all of this. We're also building a toolbox of all of the tools that these projects use so you can see what tools are most used by which projects. And we found four major categories of these types of projects in developing countries so far. The first category is a complaint type website, which takes in complaints from citizens and sometimes does stuff with those complaints. Websites that track Parliament and Parliamentarians. Websites that try to make elections more open and transparent and just. And budget or financial accountability websites. And I'll give some examples of all of them. So this is ishki.com. It's based in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan. It was started by four Jordan technologists who were just so tired of going to cafes and reading blogs in Jordan, where there's complaints and complaints and complaints about everything that's going wrong. And the same complaints get cropped up over and over again, but they don't go anywhere. So there's no archive of all of these complaints. There's no way that you can look and see who else is making similar complaints. So they created this website, which acts as sort of a complaint brokerage. It's early on, right now, all they're doing is just accepting and aggregating and linking to the different complaints. In Malaysia, there's a very similar website called Penang Watch. It also accepts complaints on the website, or you can phone in your complaint, or you can text message in your complaint. Beyond just collecting all of these complaints, these guys, there's a team of about five of them, they're volunteers, and they harass the city officials until the complaints are answered in some way. So they will write emails first, they will make phone calls, they will visit city hall if they need to. They will continue to write letters and they won't give up. For those of you who do software design or development, and you know about software bug trackers, this is basically a citizen or civic bug tracker for the municipality in Penang, where they're based. QWERTY is a similar initiative. This is based in India, actually in about five different cities in India, and it uses Usha Hedi. A lot of the projects that we're looking at use Usha Hedi, which is a crowdsourcing platform that incorporates SMS text messages, you can submit information either by SMS text message or online or by Twitter now. And this allows people to make some complaints or raise civic issues in India. And when we interviewed the guy who found this project, he said, actually the city websites themselves should be doing this. This should be a city service, but since they're not, someone else needs to fill in the space. And lastly in this category, there's Cidade Democrática in Brazil. And this takes a different approach. So rather than just collecting complaints, or rather than collecting those complaints and then relaying them to government officials, they ask their users to make complaints or to cite problems, but they also ask their users to come up with proposals for solutions for each of those problems. So it gets conversations going around the problems. And more than just proposals, also strategies for how to enact the proposals that have come out of them. And so far they've come up with about two or three successful proposals that have turned into actual projects that are now in motion. It's still pretty early on for the project, but if you go to the case study on the website, you can see the actual offline impact that it's had so far. So, another category of projects that we've looked at have to do with tracking the work of parliament and parliamentarians. In Kenya, this is Amzolendo, this is the brand new website design that they're putting together. And this started by two, was started by two Kenyan bloggers, when the Kenyan parliamentarians took down the parliament website because they were unhappy with their CVs being shown to the world. And so, these two Kenyan bloggers and then the larger Kenyan blogosphere said, if you're not going to put up a website showing the activities of parliament, we're going to do it for you. And as volunteers, they went to parliament, they started taking notes, they started tracking bills and discussions, and they published all that information to a very simple WordPress blog. And now they're trying to get a little bit more complicated with it in a good way. Actually, Kenya's parliament, perhaps because of the pressure put up on this website, they're now publishing a lot more information about their activities. But Amzolendo is not stopping, they're going to try to get some of this information and distribute it in an offline fashion. So they're going to print up a booklet and try to distribute it offline in Nairobi and other cities. Vota Inteligente is based in Chile. And it was really specifically for the election, but it continues today to make profiles for each of the parliamentarians who live in Chile. So, if you search on Google for each of these individuals, you'll oftentimes come up to the profile page before their own website. So you'll get a much more objective, much more informed view of what Chileans have to say about their officials. And this is actually a very interesting case study because they had two different projects that they were doing during election time. One by a very small group of people who created an index to rate the campaign websites of the different presidential candidates and say a presidential candidate should have at least this basic information on their website in order for voters to make an informed decision. And at four of these rankings, the first ranking that they did, they found on average that most of the candidates had about 20% of the information that they should have according to this organization. Then they created a big media fuss, they went on CNN in Spanish, they worked with a lot of newspapers, and by the fourth survey that they did, the candidate websites actually went up to 80%. So, it's a really nice way to show how you can have an online campaign and directly lead to quick accountability that you can see and measure. However, that was done by a small team of people. They then had another project called Vecinos Intelientes, which used the Fix My Street platform to try to crowdsource information about illegal campaign banners and illegal campaigning that was done in neighborhoods where it shouldn't have been done and at times when it shouldn't have been done. And they figured, well, maybe we can get hundreds of different Chileans, all these reports will come in and it will all be automated. We won't have to do anything. We'll have it automatically sent to whoever the district, the election chief is in that area. But they ended up getting something like three reports, and mostly by their friends and family members. So, one of the conclusions that we've come up with in our research is that crowdsourcing is actually very difficult to do. That usually most of these projects, just like Wikipedia, just like there was this illusion that Wikipedia was a crowdsource platform, when in fact there are a team of about 20 or 30 very active individuals and then just spatterings of other contributions that come along. And it's the same way in most of the projects that we've been looking at here. Today, this is the third and the final day of elections in Sudan. It's the first multi-party elections that Sudan has seen, the entire country, for more than 20 years. You can go on to SudanVoteMonitor, I think it's sudanvotemonitor.org right now, and see reports that are coming in. And this is the third category of websites that we've been looking at, which are trying to promote more just and transparent elections. By showing, you can see the categories, defamation, disturbances, in access to voting, vote tampering, any sort of voting irregularity. And there are a lot of these projects that have come up. SudanVoteMonitor is one, there's Cuidemos Del Voto in Mexico, there's Vote Report India was another big one. But again, we find that these websites tend to have very little participation by some very active members. Guatemala Visible is a website that is not really about elections so much as the appointment of certain officials. So in Guatemala, you elect most of your officials, but for certain positions like Supreme Court Justices and whatnot, those are appointed by others. And for a long time, actually for most of the history of Guatemala's democracy, how those people get appointed is because they have connections with whoever the elected officials are, rather than being appointed on their merits. So Guatemala Visible wanted to make action, wanted to make all the information more visible about the Justices and the other appointed officials who are appointed. So I talked a little bit about how these election sites oftentimes have very little participation by a small group of people. What I really like about Vote Report Philippines, the elections in the Philippines are happening next month, I think May 9th, something like that. And this is the first time that elections in the Philippines are going to be using automated computers for the voting. So this organization of volunteers is going around the country, to different islands, and showing people how to use these automated computers. So it's doing voter education workshops, but while they do it, they're also teaching those people at those workshops how to submit reports of voter irregularities using the Ushahidi platform. And that's something I think is really necessary for these election watchdog websites. You have to train people to use it if you expect them to. Finally, the third category of projects that we've been looking at have to do with financial accountability. And in the United States recently we passed the largest economic stimulus program in our country's history. To track how that money was used, the Obama administration put up recovery.gov, which has tons of information. More than most of us can process, but you can put in your zip code and you can see which recovery projects are in your area, how the money is being spent, who's in charge of it, and what not. In addition, there's an investigative journalism project called ProPublica, and they also have Eye on the Stimulus, which is also tracking the money using different investigative techniques, and also a lot of databases. You can see on the right hand side they have all sorts of visualizations of how the money is being used. In Kenya, they had their own economic stimulus program. It started in 2003, it's called the constituency development fund, and this was a way for the federal Kenyan government to give money to local government constituencies and to have them be in charge of their own development projects. So it was a great way to build up local infrastructure and capacity in local government. And there was little tracking that was being done of how that money was being spent. The budget tracking tool shows you how the money is being spent in every single district in Kenya, and it also allows people to leave comments. I'm going to go through these other ones real quick, because I'm running out of time. This is an Israel, this is a project that gets their local budget out of PDF form, which you can't really analyze and visualize in Excel format. This is Dinero e Politica, which is in Argentina. All of these case studies are available on the Technology for Transparency website. And this looks at Campaign Finance and visualizes it in Argentina. And again, this information is made available but on PDF documents that aren't even text enabled. So they have to use optical character recognition to get the data and to visualize it, and they do it very quickly. There are also a couple of projects that don't really fit into these categories. One of them, for example in Brazil, there is a Doce Veredor, which is an adopt a local alderman or a local council person. All they do is ask one Brazilian blogger to blog about one local official once a week. That's it. It's very simple, but I think it's a very effective way to show elected officials that they're being watched, at least by somebody. And not just to watch them, but also to help them out if they need help, if they have some new plan and they want to get community input on it. And I want to end with a project in Cabara. It's the largest slum in Kenya, it's just right outside of Nairobi. And I think it reveals the difficulty that so many of these projects have and are going to have, and just the long difficult path that it is to really create an information program to improve governance in an area. So this project, they handed out some GPS devices to the residents of Cabara, had them map their own neighborhood, and created the first online map, the first freely licensed map that exists of their community. Now they're training them, they're using flip cameras and training them to make news reports, go into local cyber cafes, file reports, which show up on this map. It's everything from history to corruption to garbage cans that haven't been collected yet. And it's actually been pretty easy to do these technical components. But what they've had the most difficulty doing, and what they spent the most time on, is just working with locally elected officials and also with tribal chiefs to make sure that they support the project also. And that they're receptive to the information that's published on the website as an input into their policy and legislation choices. Because otherwise all of this information, all of this work that's done, isn't going to have any sort of effect in government, unless that government is involved. Finally, lastly, some conclusions that we've come up with. One, open government data is necessary for sustainable projects. These projects need to be automated. We've talked to too many people who are too burned out, are not making any money, don't have any support, because they have to do a lot of the reporting and investigative work. Instead, the open data should come directly from government, it should come in formats where they can create tools that will look at it automatically and they don't have to burn themselves out. Otherwise, they just don't look like they're sustainable projects and they'll probably end in a year or two. The best projects increase participation in government rather than producing skepticism and distrust in political processes. I think that's an important point, otherwise you have a lot of disgruntled angry people, rather than a lot of people using these tools to try to build a better society. We have information, we need context, avoid infodivergence. If you have ten different complaint platforms in one city, then you can't expect that your local politician is going to be able to know where to look for the information. So it's important to aggregate the information in a way that makes sense, and also in a way that differentiates it. So if you have a light post that is out in your city, and then you have a police department that's not working at all, those aren't two projects of the same priority. It's important to prioritize and to differentiate what's happening, otherwise you just get overwhelmed with a lot of information. Bridge opposing echo chambers, there's already a lot of civic participation and already a lot of information that exists out there on the internet, on blogging platforms and whatnot, but it tends to happen in different ideological spheres. So a lot of people on the left will talk to each other, a lot of people on the right will talk to each other, but they don't come together to shape policy on the issues where there's common ground, and they don't dissect and contextualize the differences. We came up with issues of verifying identities, the difference between seeking answers and seeking accountability or sanctions, and shift from issues to processes. A lot of what we see is that a group of people will come up and they'll protest a particular law or a particular new policy. But that's actually a symptom of something that's more indicative of a larger problem of an entire system that needs reform. And so some of the most advanced projects and the ones that we really think are making the biggest difference are looking at the larger system. And I'm going to skip that. I think that's it. Thank you. Well, if anyone has any questions about anything, we can take those. Unfortunately, we don't have any time for questions anymore. We don't have time for questions. I'm sorry, I had to run through quickly. Thank you very much. David Sasaki. Aber ich glaube, David wird draußen bestimmt noch euren Fragen antwortstehen. Ich spreche ihn einfach draußen an. Wir machen gleich weiter mit Dr. Peter Kruse. 15 Uhr ist es jetzt schon.
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"Transparency as a cure for the ills of modern democracy has become such a highly prized concept that the word was banned from use at Michigans Lake Superior State University due to mis-use, over-use, and general uselessness. Such lexical protests havent stopped hundreds of websites from popping up all over the world, grounded in the belief that making government information more accessible to ordinary citizens through sexy web 2.0 interfaces will lead to greater accountability of elected officials and improved governance. But is this the reality? Do we have any concrete proof that technology projects which aim to promote transparency and civic engagement have an actual political and social impact? By looking at case studies of some of the most innovative technology for transparency projects from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa we will evaluate their effectiveness, aggregate their best ideas, and make suggestions for future improvements."
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10.5446/18244 (DOI)
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This is the outline of the presentation. I will start by the introduction. The first thing is what is the World Color Survey? The World Color Survey was an experiment initiated in the late 70s in order to test the hypothesis proposed by Berlín and Gainck's book. These hypotheses were the existence of universal constraint on cross-language color naming and the existence of a partially fixed progression in these color names over time. Here is the webpage of this project if you want to take a look. The World Color Survey was made over 24 spikets of 110 languages from non-industrialized societies. If they were able to name with a single color theme the chips of this Mansell test. That is the same Mansell test of Berlín and Gainck. The main difference between the World Color Survey and Berlín and Gainck is that Berlín and Gainck is known in 20 written languages that were most of the subjects also speak English. The World Color Survey is made in written languages of non-industrialized societies. Berlín and Gainck is made with laboratory conditions while the World Color Survey was not known in laboratory conditions. These are the counterplots of both experiments. In Berlín and Gainck we can see how we locate the eight chromatic colors of English that are red, pink, brown, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. While in World Color Survey data we found four that are red, yellow, green and blue. These four colors are known as the focal unit colors. The unit hues. Unit hues are pure colors. They are colors that have no any kind of further. They are defined over the region of the spectra and this region of the spectra are related to red, green, blue and yellow. They have been found using both psychophysical experiments like the World Color Survey data but also in physiological experiments. When we are here I will explain the Philipponian-Oregon previous word that we are based on. The motivation of the Philipponian-Oregon previous word was to try to explain, to find an elegant way of explaining the focal unit colors and the unit hues using only three chromatic theory, using only the information that reach our eye. To this end they define the relationship between the axis, the accessible information about the reflected light and the accessible information about the incident illuminant. So that it's the color reflected by the surface and the color of the illuminant alone. These relationships between these two things will give us an illuminant independent surface descriptor. So we have the accessible information that as I said was the illuminant, was the color of the illuminant and the accessible information about the reflected light that is the color of the color once the illuminant has bounced the surface. Here we can see it in this picture. You that is the illuminant and once this illuminant has bounced the surface we get a Vs. It depends on the surface. In order to extend this to an illuminant independent surface descriptor we should use a wide range of illuminants. To this end the illuminant hues are the light illuminants of Granada, the forest illuminants from Chiao and also 200 combinations from the jute basis functions. So at the end what we know the accessible information about the illuminant and about the reflected surface. We solve a linear regression this equation that relates both for a set of illuminants which relate different surface information and the big range of illuminants with the incident illuminant. So that means that here we have a matrix C of m by 3 which this values. We have the 3 by n matrix with the incident illuminant and then we can found a 3 by 3 matrix which will be illuminant independent and will relate these two things. So this matrix A will encompass all the reflectance information of the surface. Okay but A yes it's a 3 by 3 matrix it's 9 parameters so can we simply it's possible to simplify more this information? Yes because A is a 3 by 3 matrix so we can diagonalize this matrix and the again vectors of this matrix will be the illuminant independent descriptor we are searching for. Then philippo-norega, set for a singularity index in order to be able to parameterize the work color, survey data and the unit use with this information. To this end they just sort the agent values in the decreasing order. They computed a ratio between these components and they take the maximum of this ratio normalized set. This singularity index has two main drawbacks that are that the proposal formulation is cumbersome and this proposal formulation is not related to any non-property of the colors. So in this work we try to tackle these two problems defining a new compact singularity index. This new compact singularity index the first thing we think about it is try to extract the relationship between the components first without ordering them. To this end we propose to represent the saliency of one component over the other two. To this end we define this i1, i2 and i3 that are the kinds of boosting of one component over the other two. Once we have done this we compute our new compact singularity index as the addition of these three parts. We have got a compact formula but we want to wonder if there is any color property regarding this index. First of all we will play a little of math with this formulation. This compact singularity index proportional to the same singularity index minus three and then we can just make one denominator, only one denominator. So then we can see that this numerator is the determinant of R1, i2 and i3, R3, i2, i1, i2, i3, i1. This kind of rotation of the point in the three axis. Also we can now we know that this is a chromatic measure that we define a color R1, i2 and i3. The chromatic measure will be done by the determinant of this matrix. Why? Because this determinant will be always bigger than zero. Because the R1, R2 and R3 will be always bigger than zero, they are reflectance properties. And this chromaticity function will be only zero if the three components are equal. If we are in a case of a chromatic surface, then the new index becomes the breaking between this chromaticity measure and the product of the three sulfite descriptors. Also once we know this formulation we try to relate them to some perceptual spaces. One of the most typical perceptual approximation given in the RGB value is to take the cubic root of the values. So if we make this new ross instead of the cubic root of the structure, we get that in the perceptual space this new formulation is just a ratio of means. I think we think that this is quite interesting knowing all the properties that are encoded in the means. Once I explain this new formulation I will show you some results. Here we can see the work of Savidata, both in the control plot and in the surface plot. And here we have the filipona index and our index. We can see that red to be slightly better in filipona, yellow and green are almost equal. But blue we make exhalate the form of the blue while filipona is selecting the part part instead of the blue. We will be better this and we put as a drawback the work of Savidata index and we make the exhalate the tools in top of this plot. So here we can see how our blue is well done. Also our red is quite well done. Both are yellow and equally good and both greens are not really worth it. They are very close so it's kind of very interesting work but they are not well done. Second experiment is the other problem that we did in Q. We pass to the XY space in order to see which part of this space is at this peaks located. So we can see how we also get the four peaks and we get these four peaks in the points of the spectra in points of the XY expected. Then the conclusion of this work is that we have developed a new compact similarity function that will fulfill the next property. First it fits the work of Savidata and the Unicube data at least as good as the filipona and Oregon one. So we can see we have showed that blue is better in our case. It reduces the complexity of the previous index and it fits the relationship between the Unicube and the chromaticity measure. That's all. We have time for questions. In your case there is no linear relationship between RGB values of incident light and the RGB value of reflected light. In other words your matrix A depends on your sample. So if you change the sample you will get my guess essentially different matrix A. Well that's the point of using a really wide set of illuminance. We use almost all the natural illuminance that you can find. If you change the illuminance the matrix is almost equal. So if you take the enog number of illuminance you are really doing an illuminant independent measure. This is the independent measure. You are doing at least a square approximation. So if you have enog number of points you will make some mistakes in some of it. There is a metameric surface or something but it will be compensated. When you are doing at least a square minimization you are minimizing the L2 norm. So most of the illuminance will be well fitted and of course there will be some cases that they will not fit it. But if you take a not wide set of illuminances it will be compensated. Any other questions? I have one. Supposing you relax the 3 by 3 assumption. Why do you assume that it has to be 3 by 3? You say the matrix A, S. Well it's just in order to simplify quite a lot this 3 by 3. So that's the idea of we have 3 by N information and lots of illuminance and N by 3 information. So the easier the simpler way of combining them is making a 3 by 3 matrix. Supposing you made it 4 by 4 or 2 by 2 would you expect a different pattern of peaks? I am not sure about this. Thank you very much indeed.
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Understanding how colour is used by the human vision system is a widely studied research field. The field, though quite advanced, still faces important unanswered questions. One of them is the explanation of the unique hues and the assignment of color names. This problem addresses the fact of different perceptual status for different colors. Recently, Philipona and O’Regan have proposed a biological model that allows to extract the reflection properties of any surface independently of the lighting conditions. These invariant properties are the basis to compute a singularity index that predicts the asymmetries presented in unique hues and basic color categories psychophysical data, therefore is giving a further step in their explanation. In this paper we build on their formulation and propose a new singularity index. This new formulation equally accounts for the location of the 4 peaks of the World colour survey and has two main advantages. First, it is a simple elegant numerical measure (the Philipona measurement is a rather cumbersome formula). Second, we develop a colour-based explanation for the measure.
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10.5446/18248 (DOI)
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Este mundo foi construido por mim. Máron Morgosa e Luis Gómez Robledo, do Université de Granada, Alan Tremot, do Université Sanitien, do francês, e o Guiaquí e o Ronnie Luo, do Université de Lid, do Unión. Estas são os conténs da minha apresentación, a introducción, o goa, o método experimental e os resultados e conclusión. Esta comunicación é na mesma frango que a que eu tive yesterday. Na frango da Comitida Ténical 155, sobre o Espáreo Uníforo para a Injusticia, a Evaluación de Cáceres Cáceres, nós testamos a equación de diferentes cáceres cáceres, com alvos ostatos dímenos experimentales. En que día anión de 99 parte feenta, en un á meoise mágu小心, mas é suave en contrário a moda. A Chevre do Instituto National, no ento powiedz x3 seically Ña, é x3 queAfaring a diferentes part disciplausயidentified ú plasticos es un lápiz e NGO del Instituto. can be the best for one data set and another different for another data set. We are going to see today. Then there are many recent color difference equation from the publication of Delta E2000. We are going to take into account Delta E2000 and also these new formulas can also fit for a small color difference, can also fit for uniform color space for all differences as more and large. Also the 99D and the formulas OSHA GP and OSHA Euclidean GP. Also I am going to consider CLF, CA94 and CNC as historical formulas for comparison. Some of the formulas have been tested and developed using the same experimental data set, the cone data set. This combined data set is formed by four subset. The BFD leads RIT to PON and BIT. Then it is necessary to have new experimental data set to check to test the formulas. But also new experimental data has been required by technical committee 155. The number of currently available data is limited. On the other hand, we can consider the range of validity of the formulas. There is another technical committee in the CAE 163 to study the validity of the range of Delta E2000. At first, Delta E2000 and CAE 194 were recommended in the range from 0 to 5 CLF units. We have previous studies indicating that most formulas perform quite badly in the very small color different range of about one CLF unit. Also a study of the color pair in the cone data set indicates that the small color differences are already estimated. Therefore, it is seen convenient to study the performance of color different formulas, especially for a small color difference set, which are of great interest in many applications. To achieve this goal, a new experimental data set has been used. The data set is formed by various more color differences in the range 0.14 to 2.14 CLF units. And to check the performance of the formulas, the way that normalize the strach index has been employed. The experimental data was obtained in two different experiments carried out in the laboratory of the Korean of San Etienne in France, called experiment R on experiment B. In experiment R, real surface metallic sample were observed in a very wide like boot under the CERTI-5. Observación of zero degree, in this way the observer were perpendicularly to the sample to avoid glosses. And the two samples were compared side by side. This geometry follows the ISO standard 3668 2003. With this methodology, five different color centers were studied. In experiment B, virtual sample were displayed in LCD monitor in dark viewing condition. The size of the patches displayed was identical to the size of the real sample. The LCD was calibrated with greater map back I1 pro kilometer, and then the color displayed were measured by a minortar del spectroradiometer. The aberrais uncertainty was around 0.46 CLF unit, and the aberrais accuracy of the color differences between pairs were lower than 0.2 CLF unit. We can consider that the relative accuracy of the LCD screen didn't affect the observer's judgment. With this methodology, the same fight center plus 11 additional were studied. Here we have the CLF coordinate of the 16 color centers, also the number of pairs and number of observers for each center. Red background indicates common center in experiment R&B. The name of the color center comes from the raw color chart. The number of pairs after slas correspond to experiment R before slas to experiment B. In bracket we have the final number of the employed pairs. Note que some centers have the same names but are denoted with A or B. As can be observed in the table, this center has closed color coordinate but not exactly the same. In this figure we can see the 16 centers located in the CLF space. Also the projection, the center has CLF coordinates in the range H290 for lagness 1.5 to 65 for chroma and 34 to 260 degrees for hue angles. Diferento número de pairs were considered in each center, differing in the lagness, chroma, hue or combination of them. The color difference runs from 0.14 to 2.14 CLF units in experiment R and from 0.20 to 2.12 CLF units in experiment B. Combining the two experiments, the data is that consists of 390 color pairs around the 16 color centers. The 26 observers participate in experiment R, approximately 14 observers participate in experiment B. 7 persen women, 93 persen men, age from 24 to 45, or with normal color vision. In total 7,524 estimacións were performed. Here we have the observer for each center, remember that the number of pairs after a slas correspond to experiment R. We have the pair used for each center. Approximately we are considered 26 pairs of samples per color center in experiment B and 10 in experiment B. The task to the observer were to estimate and score the global color difference in each pair as non-noticable score 0, just noticable score 1 or noticable score 2. Identical instruction were given to the observer in experiment R and B performed in independent sessions. O observer were instructed to face directly the sample in order to avoid the change of color with viewing angle, typical in LCD monitor. The weighted normalize stress had been used to compute the performance of the different color equation. The stress runs between 0 and 100 in such a way that greater values mean worse agreement between visual and computed color differences. This index allow a statistical inference through the F test. In the formula delta E is the computed color difference, delta B is the visual difference estimated by the observers. In this score this delta B is taking equal to 1 because for all cases it is the just noticable color difference. We are interested in only just noticable color difference, not the other two case. We can fit this value as 1 because stress is invariant through F1 to multiplying delta B or delta E by a factor. The weighting factor is the weighting factor for each color different pair i where S1 is the number of estimation with score 1, just noticable difference. And TNS is the total number of estimation for this pair. In this way the variability between the observer is taken into account through this weighting factor. In this way to work out the weighted stress we use all color pairs except the one with a weighting factor equal to 0. Which means that not any observer has estimated the color difference as just noticable. Or equivalently that all observers agree that the color difference is either non noticable score 0 for all or more than just noticable score 2 in all observer. The table shows in bracket the number of pairs after removing the pair with weighting factor equal to 0. This is because we have number of pairs and also in bracket the number of pairs used. The third column shows weighted, here we can compute also the weighted mean color difference with the formula using the same weighting factor. In the third column we have this weighted mean color difference in the CELAP unit for all centers. Values after a last correspond to experiment R. It can be noted that almost all values are below one CELAP unit which has been considered approximately as the just perceptible color difference. So can be note similar values in the result of experiment R and B. We can analyze posteriorly the good elation of the sample around each pair, seeing the histogram of the weighting factor. The optimal design will correspond to weighting factor varying from 0 to 1 with most cases around 0.5. We correspond to 50% of observer estimating the color difference as just noticable. More cases close to 0 than 1 are expected because weighting factor 0 groups the extreme two types of color difference. Non noticable or for all observer or more than just noticable for all observer. On the other hand weighting factor 1 correspond to a just noticable different score 1 for all observer, which is very difficult to reach. From figure it will be conclude a poor choice of sample for center 10, 15, 8, which will be considered in future measurements in this center. Here we have the histogram for experiment R and experiment B with the same 5 color centers. The rest of the 11 color centers for experiment B here is the histogram. Beside, few color centers have color differences with weighting factor higher than point C. This means high variability between the observer estimating the just noticable differences. In the result here we have the weight test stress for all the formulas and the two experiment. Also the value for the common data is shown to compare. The second row show the total number of pairs in each dataset and in bracket the number of pairs after removing the pairs with weighting factor equal to 0. It can be noted that all formulas perform better in experiment B than R. The reason could be the different number of both centers and pairs between experiment R and B. A small number of pairs in experiment R would lead to a deficient evaluation of the statistical index stress. For a more meaningful comparison between experiment R and B a reduced set of experiment B has been considered containing only the sign 5 center of experiment R, but with different number of pairs. The stress values compute in this subset are now very close to the values for experiment R. Also the global set has been considered with close values to experiment B with much higher number of pairs than experiment R. It can be seen that all formula except CLAB perform worse in both experiments R and B than in common data. However considering the range 0 to 1 CLAB unit in the common data similar values of stress have been reported. Therefore the range of color differences is a critical question in the performance of color difference formulas. Thus additional research will be desirable to adjust the color difference formulas in this small color difference range. Red circle indicates the best results in each dataset. In our dataset CLAB obtain the best result followed by a can 0 to a uniform color space. It is surprising that can 0 to youth in CS obtain better result than can 0 to SCD because can 0 to XCD is fit for a small color difference but with different data. It is interesting to see the statistical significance of the difference between formulas from these values of stress. Here this table show the test results for experiments R of the first 10 rows and B the last rows. Please don't worry about the number but about colors. Green mean that the formula in the row is better than the one in the column. On the contrary red means that the formula in the row is worse than the one in the column. Like color means statistically in significant difference and dark color means statistically significant difference. Surpresamente CLAB is either better or significantly better than any other formula for this data. Among the other can 0 to youth in CS performs quite better than the rest and also CIE 19 for only in experiment B. Delta E2000 is the formula performing worse in general, a set in experiment B where CNC is the worst. In conclusion all the analysis recent color different formulas perform quite badly in the specific region of just noticable color differences. Agreeing with former study realized in the context of the technical committee 163. It seems that the most recent color different formula which outperform CLAB in most of the data set are not well fitted to this particular color difference magnitude. This result encourage the research about the validity of color difference formulas in the range 0 to 1 CLAB unit. And the subsequent fit of the formula in this region. Thank you for your attention. So thank you for your presentation. Maybe we have time for just one question. No questions at all. Ah, yes. I was interested in the possibility of including pairs in which there is zero difference. Including pairs with a score 0. Not with a score but with a physical difference of 0 so that you could compute a D prime measure instead. Has this been done? Sorry, the question is to include pairs with no color difference between them. To see the answer of the server to this case. So you could compute a false alarm rate. No, we have not considered this case. But this would allow you to compute a bias free measure of performance and in principle obtain something more robust which would be nice. Yes, thank you. I think that the algorithm is much more difficult because I would predict that this typical new non-zero pair for some observers will have subjective differences. Can you might actually guess that the more observers you take, the bigger bias will be because they on average they will actually be biased in different directions. And it's not actually clear that the average deviation will be somewhere between the points, right? Yes, the internal server variability is very important. In this wall is taken into account by the weighting factor because different observers give different scores, different answers and then you weight this delta B with the weighting factor. The most observer giving the same answer, the most weight you give to this. Can you count what you don't know? You don't know in which direction each individual observer deviate from the standard CIE observer? No. Ok, thank you again. Now your turn again.
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Several colour-difference formulas have been proposed since the last recommendation of CIEDE2000 by the “Commission Internationale de L’Eclairage” (CIE) in 2001. Some of them have been tested using the same dataset used to fit them. Thus, it is of great interest to check the performance of these formulas with new experimental datasets. On the other hand, some previous studies show that many colour-difference formulas perform quite badly in the very small colour difference range of 0 to 1 CIELAB units. This paper pursues these two goals. The colour-difference formulas DIN99d, OSA-GP, OSA-GP Euclidean (OSA-GPE), CAM02-SCD and CAM02-UCS are tested with a new experimental dataset, which has been carried out in the Laboratoire Hubert Curien of Saint Etienne (France) in two different modes, physical metallic samples and virtual samples displayed in a LCD monitor. This new dataset is composed by 390 colour pairs arranged around 16 colour centres with colour differences in the range 0.14 to 2.14 CIELAB units, with an average value of 0.80. In this work only just noticeable differences have been considered from this dataset. The results show a bad performance of all studied colour-difference formulas for just noticeable colour differences, in agreement with previous studies. Further research must be conducted to fit colourdifference formulae to this important range of colour differences.
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10.5446/18250 (DOI)
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So, welcome to all of you who are still here, despite the probably late nights and very good weather and being late in the week. So hopefully I can keep you awake for a small hour right now, talking about quality, quality of color reproduction. So people like us, I think many of us do bad, bad things with good images when you think of it. Here's an example of, let's say gamut mapping. You're probably familiar with the question of gamut mapping. I'm not saying that this algorithm here by Iwafar Upp and Alessandro and Carlo is doing exceptionally bad things. But gamut mapping is about you have to change the images even if you don't want to because the devices tell you so, right? So you do things with images. They change. Here are some example details down here. You can notice. So, a lot of other applications, I mean you have to compress an image or maybe you have just a limited amount of number of colors so you do color quantization. You change the image. Can anyone answer me? You know exactly how big is the difference between these two images? Yeah, well, okay. 42. Well, that's a very good answer. Yes, I like that. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to answer that question? I mean, just think about it. You have spent several months of your time on this tiny genius of an algorithm that does wonders with the images. But would it be nice to be able to document that, to be able to show, prove that you are better than, that it's better than it was before you did all of that work or whatever? I think there's a lot of applications where really being able to quantify these kind of things would be good. Do you agree with me? Yeah, I don't do that. Wait for the answer. And you could think about the fields you're working in. And I think many of you, if you're working with images, you will find some applications where these kind of quality evaluations would be valuable. So let me kind of introduce what we could call color image quality a bit. So what is that? Well, we know it when we see it or when we see that it's not there. This is actually from a graphic arts magazine in Norway. So they should know better. Yeah, I don't know. I don't personally know this guy. Maybe he just had a bad day or something. But I think there's something went wrong somewhere there. I think you can agree. Now these are some pictures from last week's Create conference in Jörg. And well, we could ask the question, which one is the good photograph? I mean, that's not the kind of image quality I'm talking about, okay? Whether this is a good photograph or not. But to me, the very best photograph of the whole last week's conference is this one. It's just, you know, Diva Kaur, are you here? Sorry about that. I just had to show it. This just captures the moment of not the scientific part of the conference, but of the other important part of the conference. But of course, if you think about image quality in the normal sense, this is a horrible picture. The photographer of this is in the room, but she very clearly asked me not to give her credit for this photograph. But for me, it's a memorable photograph from this conference. But okay, that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about, let's say you have this original image over here. This is, you like it very much. It's a good shot, and this is what you want. And then things happen to it. Different, you know, somebody goes bananas with a non-sharp masking, or there's some limited dynamic range, or you do some compression, or whatever. Could you quantify that? So, well, color, image quality, you know, we are a conference about color, so I don't have to explain that or discuss that. But you know, we could talk still about that for a while. It's an interesting topic. And we could talk about what an image is. Maybe get equally philosophical about an image as we could for color. But my key word here is indeed quality. So what is quality? You can look in dictionaries and find different kind of definitions. You know, it could be a property or it could be more like a degree of excellence. My point here on quality is more the definition from, let's say ISO 9000. Quality is the features of a product which are required by a customer. Hmm. So quality is what the customer wants. I don't particularly like to say this because I am not working in a marketing department or a sales department or a customer relations department of some company. You know, I'm an engineer, a researcher, scientist maybe. But still, when it comes to quality, we cannot forget this. We need to keep this in mind. So what does this mean in practice? This means that when we were approached a few years back by a governmental, you know, organization who were going to go digital in terms of printing. They were going from printing on offset presses to having their own in-house digital printing. So they were going to buy loads of extensive digital printing machines. And of course, when you spend public money, you cannot just go out and buy from your friends. You need to have an official call for tender or call for proposals. And they need a way to evaluate quality. So they asked us because we had been working on print quality for a while. And we started out the project by no image, quality, everything we knew about that. But after talking to them, it became clear that really what matters absolutely the most to them was that they were able to print their official letters and documents with this logo here perfectly rendered. It couldn't be, you know, it had to be sharp enough here, all the details had to be, the colors had to be perfect. And that was really for them the main quality criteria. So we had to take that into account when we then made our independent test of print quality. We gave quite a lot of weight to the factors that mattered to this logo here. It didn't matter so much to them whether the images were produced perfectly. That's not what they were going to print. So it's just an example of how, you know, they have to keep the customer, you know, in mind here. So how can we evaluate color image quality? I'm going to put out three categories here. Measurement based. I mean, there's a lot of things we can measure. Okay? And then we can build on top of those measurements, we can build some perceptual models and we'll get back to following that track a little bit later. We shouldn't forget also that we can ask people, right, be it the customers or be it experts. There are people who have been working with, say, printing or, you know, photography for quite many decades and they actually know some things about, you know, what it takes to make good quality images. So as, you know, I still feel I'm quite a young researcher. I would like to acknowledge the old guys who have been, you know, doing this professionally for a long time. Then I mean, we have seen examples, you know, presentation of this already. You're probably familiar with the concept now to get from kind of the very subjective evaluation that, you know, individuals can do. If you do, you know, if you ask just as many people and do proper statistics on that, we can get back to something a little bit more objective. Well, it's still subjective, but objective and subjective. Yeah, that's kind of the problem with quality. We want to quantify quality. You know, we want to have objective subjectiveness. So we will talk a bit about psychophysical experiments and a bit more about more like the measurement-based kind of thinking. So starting with like measurement. So in many fields, it's common to use very simple, like we could call image difference metrics, like root mean square difference, signal to noise ratio. If any of you are from, you know, signal processing or in particular in like image compression or video compression research, these kind of metrics are commonly used. So then, you know, as a color scientist, I will kind of just take you through some arguments why this is not, maybe not a good idea. That might be obvious to a few of you, but I still think it's worthwhile mentioning. So two pairs of patches. Clearly, the color difference in one pair is much higher than the other one. To some, this is a surprise when I say that the difference in RGB color space is the same on these two ones. I think that's a quite striking example of why you cannot really use an RGB color difference to quantify color differences. So as a color scientist, what do you say? Delta E, yes. So that's typically what we can, you know, okay. With Delta E metrics, we can talk to these people who do this for a while about color difference equations and the superiority of that, which is pretty obvious. You know, and I don't have to, you know, for color, you know, that's useful. For color production, you have some sort of copier or some, you know, you make a reproduction of an original document, you just run a color target through it and you measure the color patches and, well, that's very useful information about the properties of this color reproduction device. But when we dig a little bit deeper, you know, you probably see where I'm getting at now. You have an original here, you have two reproductions. If you can see the difference, I think you can. Now if we just said, well, let's extend the color difference to the image and do the average color difference, it's exactly the same of these two reproductions. But I don't think you would agree that visually these two are equally, you know, good. Because if you look at the detail, sir, in the matches, if you didn't notice, there's a huge color difference between the two of them. So then, you know, we went from, you know, the color scientist saying something about Delta E and now we go back to images and now we have to remind ourselves that, you know, color differences are really made for single pairs of color patches in, you know, very well-defined environment and geometry and everything. So it's not really, doesn't really say anything about images. So we cannot really just take our nice color measurement device, a spectrophotometer and measure the images, the input and output and, you know, check whether the areas are pixel or the same. That really doesn't tell the whole story. So we could talk for a while about color being in context, you know, color appearance or the surround and also really the local details in the image, of course, has a lot of interest on how we see color. So color imagery is not enough and also since we talk about, you know, color imagery being not enough, I remember that, you know, if you talk about reproducing an original scene making a good photograph, it's not really about reproducing the color imagery of the original scene. This is an old example from, you know, this Foucault color management but there, you know, we couldn't have a lot of examples of that where you really don't prefer color metric reproduction. So just remember that. Now a little bit about psychophysical experiments. We have had talks about that earlier, you know, Soliker talked about that. So I won't talk so much about that. Different protocols, different, you know, established in the field of, you know, image quality, there are some protocols and some ways to get from the observer responses to psychometric scales. I just want to insist on one detail of this that I think we should be aware of. There are a few assumptions made in these common psychophysical models, in particular the one of equal normal distributions. And to illustrate that a bit, I will show you an example here of, you know, two algorithms, upper and lower, which somehow pretend to restore and enhance all photographs. So here is my, you know, the house where I grew up, an old scan from an old slide and we have two algorithms. Now we should do, you know, we have many people here, so we should always, if you have many people, you know, we should always take the opportunity to do a psychophysical experiment. So who would prefer the upper one? Who prefers the lower one? Okay, quick counting, low on wins. We're not doing it, we're not doing it. This is a decision by committee and everyone looks at the other ones and, you know, that's not the way to do a perceptive experiment. But I'm trying to make a point, so let's see. Well, this is my uncle, Ulav, by the way. Well, you know, I may not be able to make, you know, on my monitor, you know, this again, I'm not color managing my monitor. On my monitor, I kind of prefer the lower one. And this one, not so clear, but again, I like the lower one, but now I'm not so sure anymore. But you know, that's not the point. My point is, well, they all work relatively well. I would say maybe, probably if we did an experiment on this, on my monitor, people would in general prefer maybe the lower one. And everything is nice. Now you have made your perceptive experiment with, I don't know, five images. And statistically, we could be some significance. We could probably say that, yeah, we should prefer the lower algorithm. And we put that into all our devices. We ship them worldwide. And suddenly we come with this image. And this is what happens to the lower. Same algorithms. So I mean, you all probably have seen this kind of thing happening. But just think about it. This is not a normal distribution of the quality of the two algorithms. So that's two points here that I, you know, just, let's remember. That's nothing normal about image reproduction algorithms. And no, however many test images you use, you should always expect that there's another image which everything breaks up. Of course, it's not true for your algorithms because they're very robust, all of your algorithms. I know. But this happens. Okay. So the choice of test images, because you have to test on images, is important. And it can never be enough. So psychophysics, psychophysical experiments, perceptual experiments, whatever you call them, there are some tricky points. But it's still an indispensable tool for us in order to evaluate the quality of color reproduction. And one thing we can do with it as we are transitioning to image quality metrics, we have to use this kind of perceptual experiment to validate or to test the metrics. Okay. So now transitioning to the metrics. So since I, you know, I'm then focusing on a subclass of general image quality metrics, which are the full reference image quality metrics. I tend to call them image difference metrics. You could talk about image fidelity metrics are different ways to call them. And actually, we have done a literature survey on that, or in particular, Marius over there has been doing most of the reading here. And there's quite an amazing number of proposed metrics out there. And generally, you know, sometimes these metrics are just proposed and used without any testing. But if they really, you know, propose the metric, generally they find relatively good performance for their proposed metric. But if you look into it, it's mostly for well-defined image distortions. And I'll get back to that later. By the way, when I have this strange arrows here, just because there's actually a paper, you can read more about this. You know, you could check the website of the RLAB. And maybe it's online there, maybe not. So then send us an email or whatever if you want to read more about some of this. So I will not go through many of these metrics. Just mentioning one, you know, which is commonly used and, you know, an important reference in this, the SSELAB. So basically what it does is based on, you know, calculating the delta E's of pixels. But before doing that, it's doing a filtering of the images with the intention of taking, removing the details that we cannot see based on the contrast sensitivity function of our human eyes. So that's a common approach. So with then SSELAB and other of these metrics, typically what you can do, you can calculate an image difference map here. You know, you can compare, you know, this is just pixel-wise delta E and this is SSELAB. You can, you know, try to judge which one is better. It's, well, it's, this is not a calibrated viewing environment or anything. But it's not, it's not that obvious, you know, which one is better. Now remember also that there's a next step of importance that you need to go from, you know, if you really want to quantify the quality with one number, you need to go from this to one representative number of this whole image difference map, which is also a different and difficult task. So we have all these metrics. So, you know, a few years ago, well, we didn't know that at that point that there were so many metrics, but we knew about some of the metrics and we decided to test them because we were doing gamut mapping. So we said, wouldn't it be great? I mean, just as a start out in motivation, I mean, if we had an image quality metric, an image difference metric, that would be nice when we do gamut mapping because we then we could just, we didn't, wouldn't have to do a perceptual experiment. We could just, you know, use the image difference metric. And you know, I don't know if no correlation is the statistically well-defined term, but really it was all over the place. When we compared the difference in image difference metrics with the perceptual evaluation of the gamut mapping algorithms. So not very encouraging for image difference metrics, but actually quite encouraging moment for the lab's research interest because we then decided to follow this path, actually. So, well, now it's about time to tell you the outline of my talk. You know, I haven't timed myself very closely. So you know, I might have to skip some of it depending on time, we'll see. I will introduce a couple of new approaches to image difference metrics. One based on a spatial, your angle metric. Another one based on bilateral filter. I'll tell you a little bit about those two. Then I'll use, I'll introduce an image quality model. And you'll see later what that means. I will talk about smoothness in particular as one very important parameter or you know, quality factor of color transformations. And hopefully I will have the time not only to conclude, but to mention some of the areas for further research in this area, which I think are important. So spatial, your angle metric. So what is that? Well, it's built on, it has a couple of things it's built on, but it's starting from one image difference algorithm, the hue angle algorithm, which was proposed by Ronilua and company, which is being supported by the CIE, TC802 report. And it's based on C-Lab Color Difference. And it's based on the fact or the proposed fact that there are in an image pixels or areas that have higher importance, higher significance. And then you can weight those areas more. And if there are large areas of the same color or similar color, then that should be given even higher weights, not just because there are many pixels, but increasingly higher weight. And also larger color differences get higher weights. And all of this is based on the importance of hue, that being the most important property here. So I will just go quickly through. You go to LCH, you calculate the histogram of hue angles, and then you sort that histogram. You assign then different weights. You can see the highest weights to the hue angles that there are the most of. Then you sum up and weigh and sum up, and you get one magic number. Now we can look at problems with the hue angle algorithms. One thing it does not do, which is our point, is does not take into account, we mentioned before, the contrast has to do with the functions of the human eye or the fact that there are some small details we cannot see. So for half toning and other applications like that, where there are a lot of high frequencies, it is not very suitable. So that is why we decided to say, well, okay, let's learn some lessons from the hue angle, and let's take some inspiration from the family of SC lab like I will and kind of combine the two. So spatial filtering plus hue angle algorithm, very simple construct. So there are some different parameters and choices to be done. How do you do the spatial filtering? How do you do the filtering based on the contrast sensitivity function? So here is a couple of approaches, one with a spatial filter here, this one. Another one is implemented as a frequency domain. And this, well, just a simple combination of the two more, that is all we need to take away. Now comes the important part. Now you have a new idea, a new algorithm, and you need to evaluate it on images. We have done that. I will show you the details of that. We compared with other image difference metrics, did a perceptual experiment, and typically what you were looking for then is how good is the correlation between what your observers think about the images and what your metrics think about the images. So then you can typically plot this like this, you can calculate different kind of correlation and do other sorts of statistical analysis of this. We used first database we looked at was this TID database. There is 25 reference images which has been distorted or modified in different ways in different levels. And this high number of observers, this is actually a database that's published with the observer data. So that's nice for us because then we don't have to do the perceptual experiment on this. So that's a good thing to know. So here you can see, compare our two versions of the shame algorithm which is what we call it. We can see that it clearly makes a big improvement over the Hewanger algorithm, slight improvement over the SC lab algorithm. We did calculate some confidence intervals and things like that, of course we always have to do that, so I don't show that here. But you know, just general idea, it works okay. Then you go back to gamut mapped images again, the new dataset that we have created there of different gamut mapping algorithms and different test images. And then, well, you can notice the scale of the correlation coefficients here. It's really bad all over the line. None of the metrics are able to get anything close to evaluating the quality of the mapping algorithms. So you know, looking into that a little bit, why is that? It's clearly because in the other databases, there were all these different distortions, but they were all applied one by one. Now when you do gamut mapping, there's a whole lot of nasty things that happens to the images. You can lose contrast, you change the colors, you can lose details, you introduce artifacts like contourings and ring artifacts or whatever. So the current algorithms are not able to pick up that very complex modification of images. Third database made locally, just a few images here, just changing them in lightness. Well then, we find some interesting thing about one of the versions of our algorithm which didn't perform well at all, so we learned something from that. Any conclusion? Well, we have proposed a nice, you know, there's 100 other metrics, we have proposed another one which has some interesting features and properties and works kind of well. You know, I'm not telling you this is the one great new algorithm and everyone should use this one. You know, you can see you saw the gamut mapping algorithms, you know, it still doesn't work for those, so there's still a lot of things to be done. Now, another approach to take that we did using a bilateral filter, so why do we do that? Well remember that the low pass filtering of, you know, the contrast sensitivity function used in an SC lab and company. We think that there's kind of a little bit of a contradiction or a problem with that because well we know that there's such thing as a contrast sensitivity, I'm always having trouble with that word, contrast sensitivity function, but we also know that edges are extremely important to our initial system. So when we just do a filtering of low pass filtering, we do something with those edges. So then the idea is to use an edge preserving smoothing filter. Okay, and for doing that we use the bilateral filter and you know, either you already know where or what a bilateral filter is and then it's not pointing me going through the math or if you don't know, then really all you need to know is that it's smoothing but edge preserving. Okay, so I don't want to go, well you know, there are some parameters, no, smoothing filter, how much to use smooth in the spatial domain, that is just as with SC lab and those, you know, using the contrast sensitivity function, that is determined by the viewing distance of course. I mean if I look at an image from far I see less details from me if I go close, that's obvious, so you need to take that parameter into account. Then there is the spread in the kind of the output domain in the range and there, you know, what do we consider an edge worth preserving and what details will be smoothed. So, there we use the entropy actually to determine that. And again, experimental results comparing perceptual experiment with category judgment, this time we have done everything ourselves, this is not based on the databases, so this is a new set of test images or the test images are well known test images, but new set of distortions. You know, we change lightness, chroma, hue, we apply different compression, we apply noise and we do sharpening and blurring operations. And when looking at individually at these different modifications of the images, we achieve quite good correlation with this geometry. So, just an example, I was going too much into detail. Can look at the correlations here which are quite good. So this is not really finalized, you know, I think there is still some tuning to it, but I, until somebody commits me of the opposite, I think it's a good idea. So, maybe you know, if you have some comments on that afterwards, I'll be happy to hear your comments on that. So next part, an image quality model. Now, this, describing here is a work that was done particularly in the context of printing, but most of it is generalizable to other kinds of color production areas. So what we're doing here is to kind of realize that, well, it's not, we shouldn't just be focusing on this image difference metric, giving this one number, you know, how big is the difference between images. It's really much more complex than that, and we really need to consider the whole, you know, range of quality attributes. And, but to have some systematic around that, we have defined this model here with, where there, we have identified five major image quality attributes. Actually, there's six, because in printing we can also have to consider the more physical attributes. If we kind of take you away for the moment for the case of the illustration, the more general attributes, sharpness, color, lightness, artifacts and contrast. This has, well, you can question how, you know, whether you agree with these or not. I think everyone probably agree that these are all important quality factors, whether they are the most important or not. But this is based on, you know, on expert advice, on literature, on some experiments also that I will show you afterwards. So I don't want looking at time. I will probably not spend too much time defining these, because that's, you know, a bit difficult sometimes to define these. We know, you know, what it is, but when you really want to define it, it's a bit complex. So in particular contrast, you know, how do you define the contrast of an image? One says that contrast is important. You know, you, you, everyone knows that. But, you know, what is, how do you measure contrast? We've done actually some work with that. I won't go into that now, but we have, you know, evaluating and measuring the contrast of complex images. It's like an interesting task. Well, color and lightness, you know, although what that is, you might argue why we have separated, you know, and color includes lightness and there's some problems in the definition there. But, you know, the lightness is so important by itself that in the model it really makes sense to separate it out as a separate component. Artifacts, well, depending on the color of production, device and process, there are many different artifacts that can happen. And those are, of course, very important. So now with this model now, we can do different things. We can try to identify the relative importance of the different ones. And we have done some experiments on that. Well, I don't claim that these are the generally, you know, the general universal weighting between, you know, color and sharpness and contrast. But for this particular color production workflow we're working on, that was the case based on the experiments we did. Now I won't go further on this, but there is, of course, quite a lot of further work to do here. Some of it we are doing currently, some of it we hope to do later. You know, if for these different attributes, we would like to define some metrics. It doesn't have to do, you know, in this model you could base yourself on a perceptual experiment and use this model. It would be useful. But of course, again, we really want to be able to just measure this, right? And how do you combine, once you have some estimations of these different perceptual attributes, do you want to combine? How do you combine? Do you want to combine it to get one final quality attribute? Maybe not. So last part. I'm now going into, going away from trying to cover the whole field of quality into one specific important quality attribute, the smoothness of color transformations. And this work here is based on the ongoing master thesis work by my student Anna Aristova. So it's still work in progress. She just has a few weeks to do the last final works on that. So color transformation is the key component in, you know, color production workflow. You know, you typically can be based on ICC based color management or other types of, of protocols. And very often you have a 3D lookup table somewhere in the system that does, that color transformation for you. Now it's quite common and possible to evaluate the color metric accuracy of a color, of a lookup table or of a profile, especially if you know, you talk about the color metric rendering intent of your ICC profile. You can and I think you should evaluate the color metric accuracy of it. Just as a side note, very often you, people use color management. They just push the button and say, now I have a color management system. But we should all know that color management is not exact science. So if we are using color management, especially if we're using it in a kind of a, in a research setting, we should definitely evaluate the quality of the color management we have been using. You know, and, and we can do that relatively simply calculating some deltas and stuff. But what that does not cover is the smoothness of the transform. You know, and especially in many images you will find that there are grade, smooth gradients like this. And if there's a problem with the smoothness of the transform, you will see problems in these areas. So well, just reminding you. Now we're kind of, if we relate ourselves to this diagram here, we are now going into one of the artifacts, right? Because smooth, well, how do we define smoothness? We'll spend some time on that also. One way to, to think about is that, you know, what happens when you lose smoothness is that you get typically contours or other type of visual artifacts like banding contours. It can be enhancement of the, of noise or. Yeah, you can, you can see it here. It's a typical example of what can happen in, in those gradients. And there's many reasons why, why a color transform can be non-smooth. In particular, these color transformers are based on measurement, color measurement. And color measurement devices are of varying quality. They've done some evaluations of different color measurement, color measurement devices for, you know, for printing in particular. And they, they, you know, are noisy measurements. And there are other reasons, you know, the interpolation methods can be wrong, you know, different lookup table sizes, different interpolation methods, computational errors and things like that. So our goal here is to try to find an objective way to evaluate particularly the smoothness of color transform. And that should be objective, but it should correlate well with the visually perceived smoothness on images. So you can imagine, you know, this is kind of illustrating the lookup table with its output space. You can kind of imagine that there might be some problems with smoothness in, in lookup targets like this. And they, they very often look, if you look at the data, it's very often quite irregular like this. Now, so, so what has been done before on smoothness? It was, in 1999, I remember there was a very good talk, talking about the importance of smoothness. It's kind of my first reference for the Thorals and the CIC conference. So he said, you know, smoothness is an important property. And he also said something about, you know, step-sized ingredients should be below delta E of 0.25 to guarantee smoothness. Then much more recently, Phil Wien from the London College of Communication proposed a measure of smoothness and briefly going through that here. It's based, you know, you can say it's a second derivative of the, of the gradient, but it's based on, it's using delta E2000 as a, you know, as a way to calculate the second derivative. So you first calculate this delta E2000 between adjacent steps, and then you do the, another derivative of that series on numbers and you pick 95 percentile of that as a value representing your, your smoothness. That approach has been extended by Kim et al, where they add some more intelligence into this. I won't go in detail on that in the interest of time. Now what we see is that there is only very limited testing of these proposed algorithms. They have been tested. There has been some perceptual experiment, but it's, we could say that it's in the, done in laboratory conditions with, you know, synthetically generated profiles and, you know, adding simulated noise. And, and other criticism is that they're really basing the metric on a single ramp. So, what we are doing is that we are proposing a new method which is based on extending from ramps to planes, color planes of the lookup tables and eventually to kind of covering the whole, the smoothness of the entire lookup table. And we also propose just to use different image, different metrics to evaluate smoothness. So here are some example, you know, color planes. You can imagine that they are not that smooth over here. Now this is work in progress. You know, we might adjust these things a bit. So this is kind of just how it is right now. You know, how we are looking at the different gradients in horizontal directions and vertical directions of every plane. We are averaging them. We are multiplying. We are summing. We are taking the percentiles and doing some combinations of those things to kind of end up with a, you know, a plain metric value in the end that we hope will quantify smoothness. And here are some examples of, you know, a color plane where, you know, you can look at the ramps in the output space here and the gradients and that sort of thing. Now other approach was to use image quality metrics. Now we have tested a lot of different image quality metrics. I don't want to go through them all here. The GSSIM, you know, SSIM or SSIM is maybe known to a few years, quite well, quite readily available online and quite much used for that reason. And because it's actually some quite good idea to use it sometimes, there's an extension of that, including a Gaussian filter. Here is a very simple equation called structural content. So the idea behind using these kind of structural similarities, structural content is that, okay, remember that when smoothness goes away, what comes are typically edges, false edges or false contours. Well that is structure in the image. That's new structure that wasn't there before. So if we compare the structure of the original image with the structure of the output image, we should be able to see some differences there if there is a problem with smoothness. Very quickly, experimental setup, you know, real printer profiles, generated a lot of different profiles with different parameters based on different measurements. Again, we'll see in the results there are kind of three different groups among those 45 different profiles. These synthetic images here are test images, having nice gradients in them. Use the different profiles, display it in the monitor, do perceptual tests, and then test our different metrics against the perceptual tests. Just an example of how this kind of can look. We actually, we'll see from the results also that actually these, if you compare these balls here, it kind of looks like balls with the corresponding ramps, just, you know, one dimensional ramps between these two colors, actually in the balls we see the problem with smoothness much more clearly. It becomes very visual when we use these balls. So they are, we found that these kind of test images are quite good for this to evaluate smoothness. So while here is kind of visual judgment, you know, the mean opinion scores, you can kind of identify the three different categories of profiles here. I'll just go quickly through this. We go into, you know, from mean opinion scores to Z scores, you can then look at the correlation between the different metrics and the Z scores again. So here's Phil Green's metric, not a very good correlation in our data. You can kind of read this diagram. We have seen it, seen it before, this kind of how well does the perceptual data correlate with the metric. So here, not a very good correlation, not better. So here is our color planes method. Well, then, you know, you start to see something here. So correlation is still not something to shout about, but, you know, yes, quite much better than the existing ones. Especially if we removed something we noted to be outliers in the data. Well, we can discuss whether, you know, just, you know, removing outliers, you know, is that okay to do? I could argue for why it can actually be valid to remove those, but I won't go into that. Now here, image difference metrics, structural content. Well, okay. It's relatively good. No, well, it depends. You know, what's a good correlation or not? But comparing to the existing state of the art metrics, these actually give quite good results and also this one. So conclusions on this part. The color plane metrics works well. If it's possible, if there is a reference image, then we can use the image difference metrics, those are focusing on structure that works to evaluate the smoothness of color transform. And there is some further work. We would like to do a perceptual evaluation on more complex and real images based on this also. So that brings me towards the end. A little bit of general conclusions before I will point out some forward things also. You know, quantifying quality, well, you can see from the name already, it's not easy. But it's a very important research area and it's really something that we make sense to work on in terms of research. Well we have gone through a different, some of the research we have been doing, some different approaches to image difference metrics, smoothness, you know, but actually filter, etc. So perspectives, well, one perspective would be to avoid to do subjective assessments in the future, you know, because it's time consuming and you know, many of you have either conducted experiments or been test persons in this. But there's still a lot of work to do. We still have to do it for a while. We still know good enough, generally good enough image quality metrics, I think. So this holy grail of just being able to take an image and just put it into some machine, some algorithm and get this one magic number that says everything about its quality, well, that's still far away. And maybe it's not even the best goal. I mean, we focus everything on this holy grail. Now maybe we miss some important points. So notably the different dimensionalities of image quality, you might say. It's not all about one number. It's really useful if you can identify some pertinent numbers, but there can be many numbers. So what directions are there to take? You know, what are the applications there? You know, I think, you know, we talked a lot about images. I think audio-visual quality, looking at video, looking at audio and video together, you know, what's the relative importance of audio and video in different situations? Let's say for our video conference, for instance, well, if the video disappears and we can still talk, well, then it still works. The opposite doesn't work. So I think there's a lot of applications in this area. I would like to mention, you know, that, you know, in the beginning I said we're not doing the quality of the photo, but this is actually quite interesting to look at the aesthetic quality of images. I mean, there are some rules of composition, et cetera, of how to make good photographs. And maybe we could have, you know, a computer help with that a bit. Maybe it's able to, maybe we could, for instance, train a computer to say something about whether this is kind of a high-end photo or a low-end photo. And Eitor, are you here? Yes. So my student working with me and tailgivers and Amsterdam on that right now. I think it's a very promising area of future research. Now, you know, spectral imaging is one of my field of interest. And I think as devices start to be available there not only for image capture, spectral image capture, but also for production of spectral printing, then the need to evaluate the quality in this area becomes important. Just mentioning a very interesting approach, I think, to get a lot of observers. Can we do these kind of experiments on the web? Of course, we lose a lot by that, but we gain in numbers. So that can be an interesting way to follow. And what I was planning to say something about today also is now, if we have a good image quality metric, how could we use that actually for optimizing image color production algorithms and systems? And I think that's a very important area of future research for even with today's metrics, which I have shown you is not that good. Still they can be useful in this context. If you can put it into an optimization framework, if you can simplify it and put it, formulate it in a way that it can be optimized, then you can actually do some good things on quite a lot of different fields. And just imagine if we had, let's say, a perfect quality metric, then we would easily solve many of the research problems in color reproduction. And that's time for questions, not too much time, but you have time. Thank you, John, for this very, very interesting talk. We have already one question here. Bernard, please. Yes, very interesting fields. You talked about, but I didn't catch one aspect. You use the quantities color and sharpness in your model, you proposed. Do you think that there is a correlation between sharpness and color appearance in an image? There's a correlation between everything. I do not. It would have been nice in this model if we could say that, well, we now have identified these orthogonal dimensions of image quality. But no, I do not at all pretend that. So when you combine them, well, yeah. Yes, that's an interesting aspect, I think. Yes. Thank you. I know it's our question. Yeah. Yes. Very interesting talk. Thank you very much. I wonder, have you compared the ICAM06 that you also use bilateral filter with your bilateral filter approach? It would be interesting because the bilateral filters are applied in a little bit different area. Okay. I am not sure. Barium, can you answer? Did we look at ICAM06? Maybe you missed that one. That's a very good point. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I'm back. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I'm back. If you print images and want to compare them, we have the problem to measure the printed result and then compare it with indexing and all the stuff. Do you have an idea how this contributes to the image difference evaluation? Very good question. We have a poster about that. We have in that area of looking at print quality, yes, that definitely is a part of it that needs to be considered. Could you estimate how much is the influence already of that scanning and measuring approach to the resulting, the 50-50 or 10% closer relation and the contribution of the arrows thrown to that? I'm not so happy with numbers. No, I won't give you any numbers. Okay. Yeah, we can look into that more, but we are working on that. I would recommend you to check out the poster by Marius and another student who's working on that. Concerning the quality, are there approach that consider differently the type of local feature? For example, it seems to me that it should be different in a texture area. There are other type of difference that you are sensitive to in texture area, different in gradient area, different in uniform area and edge. So are there approach that are taking into account this aspect? Yes. I mean, definitely I agree with you and different kinds of context and graphical context and content on a page or whatever it is on has different quality criteria. And there is a lot of research on those different areas. I don't know if anyone has tried to put everything together to make a global model of the quality of anything. No, any printed type of material combining. But what I mean is maybe instead of having overall, they are overall measure on the image, but maybe they should be locally adapted on the nature of what is in the picture. Oh, yes. So I was thinking when if you have a page layout that would be an image and there would be text, there would be graphics, but if you think about everything, because that would be better if you knew already that this was text, for instance. Now if you had an image that happened to contain text, then well, of course, it's possible to look for that specifically. And in general, you could say that there are many types of different types of images. And if you started with the classifying, is this, you know, getting an image, is this graphics image, is it, you know, a document image, is it landscape, is it a portrait? Then you could do different quality based on that. That's true, but even in an image, for example, the one with the balloon, you have an area which is gradient, you have an area with details, you have, so inside the image, it's also different. I completely agree that that would be possible to do. I'm not, I cannot off the top of my head say whether there is anyone who's tried to do exactly what you're asking for. You might, you know, it quickly becomes very complex because, okay, you can look for text because you're specifically interested in text, but then there's a lot of other things you could look for in an image and have specific quality criteria and for. And well, it does become complex, but you know, maybe that's the way we have to go. The last question maybe to psychologists here, it's related to this slide where you had quality in blue and quality in red. And I don't know if other had this impression that it was coming out when it is blue and going out. So what's the reason for this? I was on purpose just to say, you know, no, something like that. Well, it can be explained quite simply, it's actually an optical phenomenon where, you know, the blue and red diffracted differently in the lens and it actually focuses on different planes. But it's quite, you know, if graphic designers should know about this, they should, you know, not do this unless they really want to do it because if you're supposed to read this story, you know, then it's pretty annoying, but it can be fun. Yeah, also. Okay, thank you very much once again.
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Quantifying the perceptual difference between original and reproduced (and inevitably modified) color images is currently a key research challenge in the field of color imaging. Such information can be extremely valuable for instance in the development of new equipment and algorithms for color reproduction. While in many research areas it is common practice to obtain quantitative quality information by the use of perceptual tests, in which the judgments of several human observers are being collected and carefully analyzed statistically, this approach has serious limitations for practical use, in particular because of the time consumption. Motivated by this, and aided by the ever increasing available knowledge about the mechanisms of the human visual system, the quest for perceptual color image quality metrics that can adequately predict human quality judgments of complex images, has been on for several decades. However, unfortunately, the Holy Grail is yet to be found. The current paper outlines the state of the art of this field, including benchmarking of existing metrics, presents recent research, and proposes promising areas for further work. Aspects that are covered in particular include new models and metrics for color image quality, and new frameworks for using the metrics to improve color image representation and reproduction algorithms.
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10.5446/18253 (DOI)
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Oké, dank je voor de introductie. Mijn talk zal over de image en analysering van soep, ontdekking van fruit en vegetarische partijen. Dit allemaal om kwaliteit van informatie over de apparaat. In dit geval zal ik de kleur van het product concentreren. Eerst de kort uitleg van mijn talk. Een paar achtergrond over Unilever, R&D, waarom we dit doen. Over de influentie van kleurappeleer op de percepcijf van de consumer. Hoe we deze producten visualiseren en hoe we de kleur van de producten analyseren. De metde-developementen en de validatie en natuurlijk eindig met de conclusie. Unilever is een grote multinationale supply van food en home en persoonlijke producten. Het is de wereldnummer 1-dealer in ijskoen, teken, weight management, spreden zoals margarine en drestings, maar ook in deel en deelderans. Maar ook grote posities in landen en oralkeer. Maar misschien beter gek known van de producten. Er zijn veel grote 1 biljoon branden zoals Lipton en Knor. Maar misschien beter gek known van de producten zoals Lipton en de ijskoen, de Magnum en de Cornetto, Ben en Jerry's. Voor een geval, ze zijn op de hard brand in ieder land een verschillende naam. Voor een geval, in Duitsland is het namelijk Rammese. Hier zie je in Finland dit naam. Ook in Jounsou, als je het bijna ziet, zie je hier ook de hard brand. Maar ook veel andere producten zijn gemaakt en moeten bezoekd worden voor color en apparence. Unilever R&D is 6 globale research centres. Een in de USA, twee in de UK, een in de Nederlanders, een in India en een in China. Voetresearchies zijn in Nederland gelocat. Hier zie je de locatie. R&D locatie, meer dan 1000 mensen werken. Dit is een combinatie van laboratie en ook met pilotplans. En op deze locatie, ongeveer 500 mensen werken op voetresearchies. De color of food product is heel belangrijk, want het is linked met nutrients, zoals antieoxidants. Ze spelen een heel vite rol in de body defense tegen diseases. En ook zijn ze een indicator van vreschiness en flavor. De visie op de apparence is de consumerperception, niet alleen op color, maar ook op flavor en kwaliteit. Het zou heel mooi zijn als we de real-war wilden in colorimetric accurate color images kunnen kopen. Dit voor communicatie, archiefing en panel testing. Voorstig, door onscreen paneling. En verder obtainen we kwantief informatie en het relatie met de consumerperception. De color apparence begint met ingrediënts. Vooral als je vresche materieel, zoals voeten en vegetarien, hebt. De kwaliteit begint op de post-verfasting, maar ook de transporten naar de factory. En ook een heel grote invloed is op de proces, zoals de mixingsververfasing. En ook de temperatuur, de troedering. Vooral het final product is belangrijk en ook de pakkingmaterieel. Maar ook na de preparatie, de color apparence is belangrijk. Als eerste voorbeeld, ik zal je de invloed van de heerververfasing op de fruit, in dit geval welpepper. Dus de invloed van tijd en temperatuur. Hier zie je een overvuur van, in dit geval, de invloed van de temperatuur. En hier een increase in tijd. En als je op deze stukjes van belpepper kijkt, zie je al een schift van een brachtgrieft color naar een meer olifgrieft color. En wat gebeurt, als je in de 3D color spas kijkt, dan zie je meestal een schift in alleen de A-value. Dus door het simpliferen, zie je alleen de A-value en nu zie je een schift van een minder negatieve A-value. Dus een schift van een brachtgrieft color naar een meer olifgrieft color. Dit zal de verkeerde verkeerde vetsen zijn, maar er zal ook accepties zijn, waar je bijvoorbeeld brokkenlijken kijkt. En nu zie je ook een gebied in deze geval, ook een vorm van een brachtgrieft color. In deze geval zijn de enzijmen nog steeds actief. En door de temperatuur te incremen, kun je de enzijmen verkeerden. En dit is called blanching, dus een brede kleinkolor is gevormd. Maar als de temperatuur te hoger is en ook in een langere tijd, kun je ook een schift naar een meer olifgrieft color de verkeerde verkeerde vetsen van de chlorofiel. En ook is er een influent van verkeerde vetsen, ook een verkeerde verkeerde verkeerde verkeerde vetsen, dus een toon minder negatieve A-value en ook voor een belpepper, dezelfde proces. Voor een belpepper is het relatief homotiniëst de kleur, dus je kunt altijd de relatief homotiniëst de kleur vinden, je kunt de kleur met een originele kleur gebruiken, maar niet alle voetproducten zijn heel homogenisch. Dus, speciaal als je zoekt, zijn er alle vies in het en de kleur met een kleur met een homogenist geeft alleen een verscheidige kleur en niet veel informatie. Voor voetproducten kan je gebruiken van verschillende imaginele devices, je kunt gewoon een flat-bed-schitteren, voor flat-samples zoals wijs of schijf, dus een erg lege method of je kunt alle soorten camera-systemen gebruiken, zelfs commerciale systemen, voor de verkeerde en de vegetables, voor de eten, de soepen en de zorg, de zwart en de zorg. De soep is een heel belangrijk voetproduct, een heel homogenisch product, in de soep vind je alle soorten voet-vegeten, dus de schijfde deel, maar ook herbes, noedels, kleins en roepen. Voor de volgende sample-pre-treatment gebruikt, de totale product is geïnmaged, de product van de schijfde en alle partijen die erachtig zijn, zijn ook geïnmaged. In dit geval een imaginele system van DGI is gebruikt, ontdekend een lichting-commonet met dagelijkslampen, met een orde camera, in dit geval een Nikon-camera, dus de sample is geplaatst in een kup, dus dit is de liquid soep en de partijen zijn geplaatst op de platen en de system is gecalibreerd met een kleur target. De system is gemodificatiseerd met mirrocks op de top, als je kijkt naar deze laad, zie je hier de extra mirrocks, dus de licht van de dagelijkslampen is direct met mirrocks, op de topmirrocks en dit om de sample te gebruiken, en hier zie je de verschil tussen de normale lichting die vervies, die is standaard voor dit system en de system met directieel licht, met angst en mirrocks. Dus met de vervies licht, het ziet erg duur en ook wat scherpe spots zijn present. Dus dit is meer dichter de percepciën van het product. In dit geval, de soep was geplaatst in een kup in dit locatie, en wat zal gebeuren als we de kup onder de camera plaatsen, dan zie je dat dit een scherpe soep is, dan zie je in dit vervies licht een scherpe licht. Dit is meer vervies als je een heel kloosie tijl gebruikt. Dit is een vervies tomatotijl en speciaal in de vervies licht, die zie je in het scherpe licht en ook met mirrocks. Je ziet het fijn, maar niet zo vervies als met een normale vervies licht. Dit is gehaald door de opening van de camera. Het is een heel licht gebied hier en de rest van de bovenkant is licht, kwee. Dus dit is de lichtgebied op de top van het. Een speciaal plaat was gemaakt om de percepciën te vervies en hier volgen de kup. Dus de image is altijd op hetzelfde locatie gedaan. Kijken naar de distributie van licht, dit is met een normale vervies licht. Hier was een alternatieve kupstap gebruikt. Dus de licht, een hoge intensiteit is op het centrum en een hoge intensiteit op de licht. En dan compareren we dit met de aangeldspelstuk. Je ziet op het centrum een hoge intensiteit en een hoge intensiteit. En de schilder is comparerbaar, wat lichter dan de aangeldspelstuk. Voor een uniformiteit correctie, een speciaal aluminium-koorte plaat is vervies met het systeem. En als je kijkt naar de uniformiteit van deze plaat, het ziet er apart uit van de andere vervies gemaakt met normale papier. Dus er is veel verschillen. Dus deze aluminium plaat is niet zoekbaar voor een uniformiteit correctie. En de distributie van licht, als je een soep gebruikt, is het vervies met het papier. Voor de calibratie, het calibratie-tarket was gebruikt met 237 kleurvervies. En als je de afgrits color-differenties ververstelt, is er een grote vervies. En met een aluminium plaat is het even groter. En met een normale papier gebruikt, heb je een lichtere color-differentie. De method was verleden met 36 soepsempels. Hier zie je een overvies. Deze sempels werden analyserd met het DCI-systeem. En ook met twee verschillende typen van color-meters met een verschillende geometrie. Ik zal je de resultaten van de ververstelling met het DCI met de Hunter Lab lab scan laten zien. Dus hier zie je dat er een heel goed correlatie is van de Hunter Lab met het DCI-systeem. En ook met de A-value en de B-value. Voor de subsempels is het belangrijk om producten met elkaar te verwerken. Dus hier heb ik de kleurvervies al gemakkelijkd tussen de color-differenties van het DCI-systeem. Dus ook de discriminatie van een color-meters is vergelijkspunt op het DCI-systeem. En hier zie je de comparatie van de ververstelling. Dus de ververstelling is nog wat beter dan met de color-meters van het DCI-systeem. En met de Minolta ververstelling is het niet zo goed. De systeem kan ook voor een meer chronische measurement gebruiken, zoals de lengte of de width. Een voorbeeld van een storage-trial. Het is een ververstelling van producten na producten en na acht maanden. Dus de color is vergelijkspunt. Hoeveel is de structuur meer grotend? En dit is omdat de hoogtelijke sterkte in het product is. Een nieuw product van de producten ziet meer fris. Hoeveel is de storage? De color is vergelijkspunt door de oxidatie. En hier zie je ook van de a-values. De systeem zal in Poland in Potsnams vergelijkspunt worden geïnplamerd. Dus de DCI kan gebruikt voor een color- en opgevingen analiseren van de sterkte, om de vegetarische partijen te ontdekken. Dus de ververstelling is vergelijkspunt op een color-meters, waarin er veel meer informatie over de morphologie van de sample is. Is er nog vragen? APPLAUS Ik moet me wel aangepast zijn met de presentatie van de company. Nog een vraag? We hebben er nog een vraag. Ik wil weten hoe de company deze informatie gebruikt. Een color-meters informatie. Misschien voor de recepten of voor de conservaties. We gebruiken deze method voor de ontdekking van nieuwe producten. Het zal ook in de ontdekkingcentrum worden geïnplamerd, en niet in onze factorie. Het is dus voor de ontdekking van nieuwe recepten voor zoek en ook voor verschillende pakkingsmateriaal. In een van de laatste klanten zien we ook oxidaties voor producten, maar ook een heel slecht pakkingsmateriaal. Nog een vraag? Is er ook een mogelijkheid om de kleur van de pakkingsmateriaal te gebruiken? Ja, je kunt het ook gebruiken voor de pakkingsmateriaal, dus het is meer makkelijk dan analyseren in een hoge klotssoep. Een tweede vraag. De kleur van de temperatuur, D65, is er een reden voor dat? Dit is een standaard in de industrie, dus we hebben het selecteerd. Dank je. Maar om te concloeren met dit punt, het D65, als de consumer de soupiet eet, is het niet D65? Nee, maar voor de ontdekking, als je om te compareren met producten, moet je een soort van illuminatie selecten. Maar we kijken ook met de panelen ook op de verschillende lucht, maar voor een method voor producten, moet je een soort van illuminatie selecten. Misschien kun je dit als ik de soupiet met D65 heb gelegd. Dank je wel.
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Within Food R&D scientists, chefs and engineers aim to develop natural fruit and vegetable based soups with optimal flavour, texture, appearance and health benefits whilst maintaining product safety. The colour and appearance has a major influenceon the perceived quality (e.g. nutrition and freshness). This paper describes a methodfor the determination of the colour of soups containing vegetable particles. Digitalimages were made under controlled lighting using a DigiEye imaging system. It allowsdocumenting the appearance by making colorimetrically accurate images which aresuitable for the measurement of colour uniformity, size and shape. The uniformity of thelight under diffuse and directional illumination was investigated using different targetsand soup samples. For accurate colour analysis the images have to be corrected fornon-uniform illumination and the colour has to be measured at a fixed location outsidethe centre of the lighting cabinet. Directional illumination (angled light with additionalmirrors) was used to introduce gloss resulting in images matching the actual appearanceof soups and vegetable particles very closely. Imaging glossy soups under diffuseillumination resulted in dull images with dark spots. No significant difference was foundbetween the colours of soups analysed under diffuse or directional illumination. Underdirectional illumination a better repeatability was observed. Additionally, for 36 differentsoups, the measured results from the DigiEye system were compared to two differentcolorimeters (0°/45° and diffuse/0° geometry). Linear relations were found betweenthe CIE Lab values measured by the DigiEye system and those measured by two differentcolorimeters. Best correlations were obtained between DigiEye and 0°/45° colorimeter(r2=0.980-0.996). The short term precision of the DigiEye system is somewhat betterthan those of the colorimeter.
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10.5446/18255 (DOI)
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And good afternoon for everyone. So I will next present our study which has a main purpose to test and compare metrics for perceptual color differences in complex images such as natural images. So the background for the need for color reproduction quality metric came from this study's print context where we wanted to have a quality metric for reproduction quality which would correlate with per-served color difference. And of course, this would be only a technical quality because the visual quality could not actually be achieved with this kind of metrics. And so as Haderberg gave a very good keynote presentation this morning and emphasized the difference between the simple color patches and complex images, or what is the difference for the color difference computation. So I will not go too detailed into that. The metrics that we implemented are the SCLAP, UNGL, PCLAP, ICAM, and 3C metrics for simple color patches. And I will just briefly go through these metrics and not go too much into details. So as was in previous presentation, also mentioned that the SCLAP is a special extension to CLAP. This was also one of the earliest color difference metrics for complex images developed by Chang and Wandel. And it applies a contrast sensitivity of human vision to color difference computation so that the original history of the image are adapted with spatial filters, which are created from these contrast sensitivity functions. And then the perceived color difference is a pixel-wise average difference between images. Then the hue angle metric, which was introduced by Haderberg also, well, it has a base assumption that the observers focus on certain areas of an image and perceive the overall color difference based on those areas. And this is computed so that the method identifies these pixels or areas of high significance, and then specifies an appropriate weight for them. And this weight depends on the size of the area of the same color and also the amount of color difference, because Hong and Lu succeeded that the large color difference are not emphasized enough. And BCLAP measures the amount of perceivable distortion between original and reproduced images. It was developed by Zhou and Liu. And the method incorporates a threshold for each variable, just know the visible color difference for each pixel. And this depends on three localized pixel properties, such as the non-uniformity of color difference along the chromaxes, which is the same as in the C94. And the local luminance masking effect and the background non-uniformity, which is basically the pixel index average variance of this pixel background. And then in the pilot of images calculated as some of color difference that exceed the estimated visibility threshold. And ICAM is a framework for images that take into account the color-appearance model. So it's actually a well, image color-appearance model and was developed by Fairchild and Johnson. And the framework is based on different models that accounts various properties of the color appearance in complex images, which are the contrast sensitivity modeling, same as in BCLAP and the spatial localization. Local contrast detection and uniform color space. Or in our implementation, the spatial localization, local contrast detection was not included. So then the perceived color differences again computed as pixel-wise average between the images in this uniform color space. For the testing, we choose eight different test images, which were selected so that there were also low and high spatial frequency content, and also that they had such colors that gave a decent range of different distortions. And the test image distortions, there were four of them for each image, and they were generated for with the ICC profile camera mapping process. And this was due to the print context, which this study was done. So we had four standard ICC profiles, and these were also selected so that the test image or the distorted test image had good range from low to higher color difference values. And also we used absolute colorimetric rendering intent, which were the most suitable for our purpose in this test. And the test image distortions are here, so they are quite linear in some of them. So below 1 to 5 deltae CLAP. And the metric performance comparison needed sub-active tests, which were completed as pair comparison. And in the test question, we have the test person was asked to select the image pair having a higher difference between images in that pair. So for this purpose, we implemented the test application, which presented two image pairs and two displays, so one image pair per display. And these displays were HOS colorates, quite high end displays, which were calibrated with the I1 and by using the displays as RGB emulation. So with this, 98% of the as RGB color space could be achieved. And these displays were also compared in their reproduction performance against as RGB profile. So we got the average of color difference from 0.4 to 0.6 CD 2000, which were quite good. And also the difference between the displays were tested, which was 0.8. So below noticeable color difference. And in the test, the viewing condition was just to correspond the as RGB viewing environment, meaning that the ambient illuminance level was set to 200 lux with color temperature of 5,000 Kelvin. And the displays were also mounted to 50 centimeter viewing distance for the contrast sensitivity function purpose. And also we have 15 test participants, all with normal color vision and normal corrected visual acuity. Then the subjective test data, these comparison judgments were converted to subjective different scale values with measured based on the organisms. And this means that the well, the high average subjective scale values meant that relatively many test participants chose the same image pair to have the higher perceived difference. And also the low average subjective scale values meant that the deviation between judgments of test participants is high and or the image pair has low perceived difference. So the performance of comparison, the values are persons correlation, which were computed between the objective metric values, which were normalized, and the subjective scale values, which were also normalized. And here we can see the PCLAP had the highest correlation, high cam also was that high. The rest of the metrics did not achieve statistically significant values. Image 2, ICAM Hue angle and surprising the CLAP gave a good correlations. And image 3, Hue angle and SCLAP were performing the best. And again, also this CLAP got high correlation. Image 4 was difficult for the metrics. None of them were statistically significant in correlation. Image 5, the ICAM was the best. Image 6, the Hue angle and SCLAP were the best. And you may now notice that for each image content, there was no one metric that were the best, and so that it varied all the time. And image 7, all of the metrics were performing well, while the image 8 was such that none of the metrics gave good correlation values. And also the image 1 and 8 were such that the test participant couldn't judge. So either the core difference were low, which was the case in the image 8, or that they just couldn't judge between different core difference, which were higher. And here you can see that none of the metrics were best in all of the image contents. In average, the ICAM was the best, but not that good. And the Hue angle, the second best, and surprising the SCLAP was really high also. So it was a summary. Well, the test and metrics are not completely capable to predict the degree of perceived color difference while two metrics came up still in the comparison. ICAM had the highest average correlation for all images, while if we excluded those images with high variation in comparison judgments, the Hue angle was the highest performing metric. And it is not for the high performances of SCLAP, which was also noticed in the previous presentation. OK, thank you. Thank you, Henry, for your presentation. Questions? What do you think can be done in future work in this field? Well, there is a lot of work to do with the complex images. As Harderberg also noted, that the work has only begun. So a lot of challenges there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Perceptual colour difference in simple colour patches has been extensively studied in the history of colour science. However, these methods are not assumed to be applicable for predicting the perceived colour difference in complex colour patches such as digital images of complex scene. In this work existing metrics that predict the perceived colour difference in digital images of complex scene are studied and compared. Performance evaluation was based on the correlations between values of the metrics and results of subjective tests that were done as a pair comparison, in which fifteen test participants evaluated the subjective colour differences in digital images. The test image set consisted of eight images each having four versions of distortion generated by applying different ICC profiles. According to results, none of the ©2010 Society for Imaging xxviii Science and Technology metrics were able to predict the perceived colour difference in every test image. The results of iCAM metric had the highest average correlation for all images. However, the scatter of the judgements was very high for two of the images, and if these were excluded from the comparison the Hue-angle was the best performing metric. It was also noteworthy that the performance of the CIELAB colour difference metric was relatively high.
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10.5446/18256 (DOI)
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Good morning. And thank you very much for the kind introduction and for the invitation to come here to beautiful Yönsú and giving me the opportunity to present some of my work to you. Also for the opportunity to, for the first time in my life, experience 24 hours of daylight. And I have to tell you, last night when I was trying to go to sleep, I experienced it more than I had wished for. So I'm going to tell you today about cortical mechanisms of color vision. And why cortical? Well, color vision basically consists of, can be thought of as consisting of several stages. In the first stage we have three types of cone photoreceptors that transduce light into electrical signals. And these signals are converted into opponent colors in the retinal ganglion cells, still in the eye. And in the visual cortex then, the excitation, the excitation pattern of the cone photoreceptors are interpreted as colors. Now, we know very, the first two stages here we know a lot about. And basically, I've written here that practically everything is known about the retina. Of course, people who work on the retina will strongly disagree with that. But they've done a remarkable job and it's really stunning what we know about color at this early stage. And already from this formulation, excitation patterns are interpreted as colors. You can imagine that we don't know very much about how this process works. But I'm going to hope that I'll be able to tell you a little bit about it. Now, of course, one of the things we know about is our cone excitation. So we have light that gets reflected from an object. For example, from this red patch in the color checker chart here, we can measure the spectral distribution. And since the absorption spectra of these three different types of photoreceptors, the blue, green and red cones are known very precisely, we can just multiply these curves and then compute how much each type of cone is excited. And this basically, this process represents the two laws of early color vision, trichromacy and univariance. There's exactly three types of photoreceptors and the excitation patterns of these three receptor types. These three numbers are sufficient to characterize the effect of this whole continuous distribution of wavelengths on our visual system. And one of the reasons why these three numbers suffice is univariance because the cones simply count the photons and they don't care what wavelengths it is, at least not directly. And given this, we can calculate basically for everything we see, the cone excitations, how much are the red, green and blue cones excited. And then we can do that, for example, for these four patches here and you will see that the numbers we get, there will be sort of more blue cone excitation here, a little bit more red here. And most importantly, we can say, well, these are different. These lead to different excitations. Now, why am I saying this? This is trivial and you all know that. Well, it gets more problematic if we introduce a context. Now, the central four patches look very similar to the ones I showed you just before, sort of this blue, yellow, green and reddish looking light. But what's happened here is that through the context, basically, and because the visual system is not looking at these patches isolated, and we're looking at the whole region around it, four patches that would simply look gray if I presented them to you in isolation appear very colorful here. So these patches here are, in fact, they're really sort of equivalent to a gray if I would present it on a neutral background. That's why I put this gray stripe here. Because the stripes start to look sort of more greenish here and more reddish here, but all I can do is to reassure you that these are indeed four identical patches here, even so they look very different, look more like what you see here. So for this type of analysis, we need to take larger regions of space into account, we need to take sort of borders between colors into account, and basically that's one of the things that's happening in our brains, in the visual cortex. And that's not the only thing. This is a schematic presentation that I've taken from an article by Grusser and Lundes, they've written a while ago, where they summarize basically what, how color sort of would affect visual processing. And of course, there's some retinal stages and some cortical stages, and basically I have colored those circles and rectangles. Basically what we know well, I've used red tones for, and what we don't know anything about, I've given it a blue tone. And you can see that sort of at the retina, we know as I said before, pretty much everything. And here at the first stage of visual processing, we know a bit. Sort of we know something about how color is, the color of surfaces and how borders are, colored borders are extracted. That we've learned a lot about this in the last 10, 20 years. But then when it comes to higher level effects of color, for example, the emotion, we know very little and there's hardly any studies on that. And there's only, when it comes to these higher levels, there's been a bit of work on color categories and how we use color names. But other than that, this is all still blue areas. Okay, so what I'm going to talk to you about today is this stage of processing that basically happens in early visual cortex. The first, cortical visual areas, primary visual cortex, secondary visual cortex, V1, V2, and so on. But before I get to the visual cortex, I'll just briefly like to go over these two stages that we know so well. And just to get back to the cone absorption spectra, which you can see here, there's two remarkable things. One, of course, is that the absorption spectra are actually quite broad, especially the middle and long wavelength sensitive cones, which are sometimes just referred to as red and green cones absorb light over the whole, almost the whole visible spectrum. But what's really remarkable and noticeable at first sight is that the spectra of the L and the M cones are so similar. They overlap to a large degree. And the reason for this is also quite well known now. They evolved only very recently. Well, 35 million is very recently in evolutionary terms. And the genetic basis for this is now also quite well known. And we know that the genes that code for these pigments are also quite similar in the DNA sequences. Now, this has the consequence, basically, that whenever somewhere in our individual field there's a light that excites an L cone, sort of a neighboring M cone will also get excited close to the same level. So we have a correlation between these two signals. And basically, what I'd like to do is I'd like to show you two effects of this similarity. One thing is a very nice demonstration that Hans Bretl, Kroswavi-Nor and John Mullen came up with many years ago now. They've taken this picture of flowers and they simulated what this picture would look like to persons who lack one of the cone types, either the L, the M, or the S cones. And basically, this happens very rarely, but about 5% of the male population are affected are the red, green, colorblind or anomalous. And you can see here that there's color left in these images. These people are not colorblind, they're red, green colorblind. So they're mis-one dimension, but the two images are quite similar. And that similarity comes from the fact that the cone absorption spectra of the L and M cones are so similar. Another consequence is shown here. And what I've done here was I went to the local supermarket and bought some fruits and vegetables and put them on my terrace, measured them with a spectral radiometer, and then basically computed from the spectral measurements the cone excitations in the red cones or the green cones. And you can see that basically all the data points here fall on the diagonal. That is basically whenever an L cone is excited by the light coming from a certain object, sort of the M cone that's sitting next to it will be excited almost the same level. So we have a very high correlation here, and that's not a very good way then to transfer the signals from the retina through the bottleneck of the optic nerve to the visual cortex. So we want the information processing to be more efficient. And Gershwin-Buchsbaum was the first one who really thought about this in computational terms, and he said, well, an efficient way to get rid of this correlation would be to do something similar to a principal component analysis. That is, we just look for two new dimensions. We don't take the L cone and M cone, but for example, let's take the sum of the L and M cones, which is basically here, this luminance or intensity axis as our first new dimension, and then there's a second axis, one that's orthogonal to it, and where we get the difference between the L and M cones. And that can be shown to be quite optimal from a mathematical point of view. And the question then is, of course, well, is this what our visual system actually does? And it has been shown later, mostly by John Kraskov and colleagues, that first psychophysically, and then also in physiology experiments, single unit recordings from the retina or the visual part of the thalamus in monkeys, that this is indeed the case. And here are some experiments that John Kraskov and colleagues did on adaptation. And adaptation is a psychophysical method to figure out what channels are used, or to possibly figure out what channels are used by the visual system to convey information to visual cortex. So mathematically, we have already established these color-opponent channels, and what Kraskov then did, he used an adaptation experiment where basically I've shown you the stimuli here in this color circle with an axis that's approximately sort of from red to green, and one that's where the S cones are stimulated differentially. And what Kraskov presented is observers with large fields of light, any measured detection thresholds, that is, the lights were modulated slightly, for example, in a certain direction of color space, for example, this one here, and the observer had to say whenever they saw something, whenever they noticed a modulation. And when you do that without anything else, you might get thresholds that are sort of on this circle here. And the distance from the origin basically presents the modulation depth of those lights, how intense was the light. Now, when you adapt the observer before measuring those thresholds by sort of presenting a large modulation for 30 seconds, it's going from red to green, red to green, for 30 seconds, then that's shown here. We have this adaptation here on this axis, and you can see that the thresholds for detecting stimuli that are modulated on the same axis, also in red and green, are now much larger. So the sensitivity of the visual system in that direction decreases, because you can think about it as that channel sort of being tired. That's actually not a good way to think about it, but it sort of predicts what's happening quite well. But interestingly, if we measure thresholds in this other direction in color space, the adaptation didn't have any effect. So from that we can conclude, and from the analogous results in the other direction here, we can conclude that there's at least two channels conveying this type of information in our visual system. And the question here, and you can already see that these two channels are independent, sort of adaptation along one axis doesn't affect the other. The question is what happens when you sort of adapt in directions in between, that is now to something that's sort of from orange to blue, and if we have many of these channels, not just two, then we would expect sort of these elongated threshold contours here as well. Whereas if we only have these two channels from before, they would both get adapted by this intermediate stimulation. So if you stimulate here, then basically projecting this on the red-green axis or on the S-con axis, both channels would be adapted, and thresholds basically would increase in all directions. And that's exactly what they found in their experiments here. So you don't get selective adaptation with a sort of a very elongated contour, but you get sort of similar adaptation in all directions of color space. So this means that these mechanisms are really the only ones. There's only two here for the chromaticity diagram and another one for luminance. So there are these three color opponent, or two color opponent in one luminance channel, as was already suggested by the correlation analysis. And John Kraskop didn't stop here. He went on to do experiments with Piedlian and Andrew Darrington where they recorded from individual neurons. They did not from color opponent cells in the retina, but cells at the next stage, sort of the lateral geniculate nucleus which conveys visual signals to visual cortex, but the properties of these cells in the LGN are very similar to the properties of the retinal ganglion cells. And what's shown here is sort of the preferred color of each cell, given as an angle in this color space that I've shown you before. So red is zero, this yellowish axis is 90 degrees, 180 degrees, greenish, and 270 degrees sort of the S-con isolating axis. And the y-axis specifies sort of how much luminance each cell preferred. But that's not really very important now, but what you see here is that each data point, which represents that individual cell's preferred color, sort of falls in one of these four clusters. So the cells prefer the zero, 180 degree direction and the 90 degree, 270 degree direction. There's no cells or hardly any cells that are sort of in between these gaps here. So these cells in the retina or in the LGN are really the neural substrate for these so-called cardinal mechanisms of color vision that were shown here in these psychophysical experiments. So to summarize this retinal stage, basically there's three channels to the brain. And these color-opponent channels are functionally independent. They're based on different anatomical substrates. There's retinal anatomists and physiologists have identified that sort of different types of cells really convey the information in these three channels in the retina. And they can explain quite many different color phenomena, but certainly not all of them. But this is basically the chromatic input to visual cortex. And I've summarized it here again in this diagram, which basically shows you this stage with the cone photoreceptors here, an image, how it and coded the magnitude of the signals in the LM and SCone. And again here, this is very similar. And then followed by a color-opponent stage with these three channels that lead to these very distinctly different channels. And of course this stage sort of has been postulated and forwarded by Helmholtz quite a bit. And the second stage basically was favored by his opponent, Ewald Herring. And the two of them were really going at each other with quite some vigor. But in the end, as often in science, it seems that both of them were correct in some ways and that the true answer is somewhere a mixture of the two. They were both wrong a little bit. Helmholtz thought that the cone absorption curves would be sort of evenly spread out with wavelengths. And Herring thought that basically these opponent colors would be sort of the, what we could sometimes call the unique use. So what you see here and what's this image that shows how this is seen by the S minus L plus M channel, that's sometimes called by visual psychophysicists the blue-yellow channel. And you see that it's not blue-yellow at all. It's sort of this greenish yellow and a very purple. And according to Herring, this would be colors that are more similar to those in the Swedish flag. So the difference is shown here. Sort of these cardinal erections are quite different from what's called the unique use. I've sort of made unique use judgments here and you can see the red is not far off, but the green, green is way off, the yellow is way off, and so is the blue. So this is very different. And basically if we talk about the stages of color vision, then it has often been mistaken and also written in textbook that basically this retinal color opponent stage would be the basis for our unique use and those sometimes called Herring colors. That's not true. That's something that must be happening at a much later stage at a very high level of visual processing where we have a small number of categories that are sort of tightly linked to language and memory, which are also of course very high level phenomena. But now we've seen what's happening here and I've told you a little bit about these categories, but now we want to see what's happening here in between in primary or in secondary visual cortex with those color signals. Now, if we talk about cortical processing of color information, I have to tell you about the most prominent theory over the last 30 years or so. It's also a very simple theory. It's the coloring book theory of visual perception. And the way it works is basically, like the name says, basically you have the world and then it's first analysis and analyzed by a luminance-based system. Basically it draws in the edges and that's only based on luminance because that can be much quicker. It's a much quicker process and then only sort of sometime later, sort of the color vision system comes and sort of fills in the surfaces with color until we sort of have this real nice colorful image or percept of our world. And then of course if due to some brain damage, what can happen is that the color system fails and then we end up with a perfect black and white rendering of our visual environment. Now that was sort of the dominant theory for a very long time and it wasn't, its major advantage was that it was very nice and simple and intuitive, but it wasn't really supported very well by data. And it wasn't, and over the last, I guess, 10 or 20 years there's been, lots of evidence has been amassed that really show that it's not like this. And I'm going to present some of the evidence now that comes from physiology, from recording from single neurons in the brain of an animal like a macaque monkey. There's also lots of evidence coming from psychophysics, but that would be a whole other talk. Now what we did in our physiology experiments, and those were done a long time ago when I was still in New York, we simply determined the tuning properties of individual neurons. And those neurons basically come from the secondary visual cortex in the area that's quite accessible from the surface and that played a very central role in this theory of segregation, where you have color analysis separate from the analysis of visual form. And what we did was we looked for individual neurons and then we basically measured everything we could for each individual neuron. So for example, we measured the orientation selectivity by presenting sort of stripes of different orientations. And then typically if the response, here are the different orientations, here's the response in impulses per second, and when the response is much higher for one orientation than for most of the others, then we would say that that cell is orientation tuned, such as is the case for this cell here. And the first ones who discovered cells like that in visual cortex were of course Hubel and Wiesel in the 60s. And we can also measure the color tuning by presenting stimuli of different colors. And now again, if the response to one color is bigger than for most of the other colors, then that cell would be called color selective because it could in principle signal colors. And we also look at how large the response to the best colorful stimulus was compared to the response to a luminance stimulus, sort of a white stimulus with the same luminance contrast as the color stimuli. So when we looked at then for how orientation, the orientation selectivity of a cell would be related to the color responsibility, we found that the two are not correlated. So if there was a segregation of color and luminance, of color and orientation, color and form, we would expect that basically all the cells that are very selective for orientation, which is basically all the cells that are to the right of this line, would not show any color selectivity, that they would all be here at the lower right quadrant. And the color cells should all be in the upper left quadrant. And this is clearly not the case. There's no correlation here. And what you can see also is almost all cells in visual cortex has been known before our orientation selective, but there's also about 50%, about half of the cells that we recorded from were color selective. And that's important because in many of the early studies, like Eubel and Wiesel, the proportion of cells in cortex that they classified as being sensitive to color was much lower. It was as low as 10%. But they only, basically they tested their cells with luminance, and if the cell responded to luminance, then they didn't bother with color. Then it was a luminance cell. And basically the only cells they classified as color cells were cells that didn't respond to luminance stimuli, but only to color. And you find about 10% of these cells, but there's many cells, about 40 to 50% in primary and secondary visual cortex that respond to both luminance and color. And we found those, and they were later also found in primary visual cortex by Bob Shapley and his colleagues. So we find no correlation whatsoever between orientation and color. The color cells that we found here are sort of perfectly capable of signaling the orientation of visual stimuli as well. And there's been another study where the similar experiments were performed in awake behaving monkeys. We did our recordings in sort of the more classical setup with anesthetized animals. This is from a study of Rudiger-Fonder-Heiden colleagues. Again, the orientation index, how orientation selective is the cell compared to the color index, how color selective. And he also, he recorded from, not only from the second visual area, but also from the primary visual cortex, and there's no correlation here whatsoever. So this shows quite strongly that the cells in visual cortex that are selective to color can also code orientation. And you might say, well, how does this go along with other studies? I've read that other people sort of got different results. Well, here's a slide that sort of compares the results from a whole variety of different studies. All done in V2, secondary visual cortex. And the results are also split up, not only is V2 as a whole being treated, but it's split up into different compartments of V2. There's different sub-parts of sub-regions of secondary visual cortex that sort of more or less concerned with the analysis of color or not. Basically, the prediction here would be that the color selective cells would all be in the thin stripes of V2. So this should be close to 100%, and there shouldn't be any in the other compartments. And with the orientation, it's sort of the opposite. And what you can see here is that all of these seven studies are relatively close to the average. There's not that much variation. The studies more or less agree, even the ones that are from the most extreme proponents of the different theories. So basically, the results that we got, sort of the green ones, are not very different from what Sami Yadzaki, for example, had found. It's just that they're typically interpreted in different ways. While we would say that this is not, there is color selectivity everywhere in V2, Sami Yadzaki would say, well, there's much more in these thin stripes here. It's just a matter of how you look at it, whether you say there's sort of a glass of water is half empty or half full. So it's mostly the interpretation that differs. But irrespectively of whether there is sort of anatomical differences, what we can clearly say is that at the functional level, there's absolutely no correlation between the two. Now, in these, for the retinal, for the color opponent channels in the retinal, I've showed you also some physiology. And then I showed you sort of the cone excitations of real objects and why, based on computational grounds, it's useful to have these color opponent channels. Now, I'm going to look, if we have these neurons that are selective to basically oriented color edges, then those, it would actually, you would assume that those exist in the real world, right? So what we did was, together with Thorsten Hansen, I analyzed sort of a whole large set of calibrated natural images that come from Fred Kingdom's lab. We also used some from the Bristol database. I haven't looked at the ones from Portugal yet. But so we have a whole set of images that are supposed to be more or less typical for our natural environment. And then what we want to look at now is whether the distribution of colored edges in these scenes. And the way we did this was we took the image, like this example image here, and then split it into the luminance and the red and green sub-images, as we know exist in sort of in the retinal, those cardinal directions. And then we run an edge detector on these images. In this case, it was just a standard Kenny edge detector from Matlab, but it doesn't matter. We tried several ones and you can filter, sort of run it at different resolutions. The results all more or less come out the same. And then we look at the combined edge strengths, the edge contrast for the luminance and the colored dimension. So let me show you some examples here. The edge, it's labeled number one here. It's this transition from red to green. That's basically, this is located up here. It has a large red-green edge contrast and doesn't have any luminance edge contrast. So this is a pure color edge, an isoluminant color edge. Those don't really occur that often and of course they occur more frequently in this image with this red flowers and green leaves than in any other type of natural image, but they occur occasionally. Edge number three, which is here, you can see is a pure luminance edge. There's no change in color, only a change in luminance. And as you can see from this diagram, well, those type of edges, number four is another case, they exist too. But in many cases, as in this example here, these edges are actually not real, are edges that we might not be that interested in. They might actually lead us astray in our analysis of the visual scene because it's a pure change, it's a shadow change. So we have a shadow here and because of the shadow, it's only the intensity that changes and not the color. And of course if we want to extract the properties of the visual scene, we want to know where the leaves are, where the borders of the leaves are, where the borders of materials are and not necessarily, not only where the shadow edges are. But the important point I'd like to make is that most of the edges are actually have a luminance component and a chromatic component. And when we looked at these histograms for not just this one image, but for all of the images, we can see that basically, I mean, there's some isolumina edges, there's some luminant edges, but the majority really has both types of contrast. And when we analyzed this also, again, with sort of correlation and we looked at the conditional probability of having a color edge when there is a luminance edge and the other way around and we looked at the mutual information. And these color and luminance edges are basically independent of each other. So basically what the visual system should do is to use both types of information and not just ignore one because the information is there. And typically whenever our visual system can use some type of information, it typically does it. That's a good argument actually for having these cells in primary and secondary visual cortex that are responsive to color and luminance information. Now, what I've shown you so far was about the color processing in primary and secondary visual cortex that there are plenty of cells there that respond to color. And most of these respond to luminance and color and most of these are responsive to edges as well and they can be used to extract form. And we did lots of psychophysical experiments where we showed that in fact our visual system can use that information to extract form. Now, some of the other questions that have been raised a lot about color in the cortex is the question of the color center in the brain. And you might have read something about that there's different visual areas either here or there, somewhere sort of lateral occipital cortex. If that area is damaged then people see the world in black and white. They don't see color anymore. Now, that's a bit of a strong claim. There have been cases of patients with acromatopsia where there has been damage, but it's the wrong impression is that those people basically see the world as if on a black and white TV. That's not the case. They have much more damage and there's one very prominent case that has been studied a lot by Charles Haywood and Alan Cowie. And in that case, basically the luminous discrimination is just as bad as color discrimination and still that patient is called sort of colorblind, which is kind of strange. But there's also been new work on functional imaging and I just going to show you one study because the results of these functional imaging experiments are always actually quite similar. Of course, they're all looking for the color center in the brain and typically they find one region in the brain where the color response is slightly higher than in all the other parts of the brain. And that area is then the color center. Now, here in this study, which was done by Doris Sau, Bevel Convay and Roger Tutel, they actually looked in the monkey brain where sort of we can quickly and easily relate, of course, the anatomical areas to the areas that are known from the electrophysiology. And they also measured the response to color stimuli and the response to black and white stimuli. And basically what you find is that, for example, in primary visual cortex, the color response is much larger than the luminance response. It's almost twice as large. And that has also been shown in many fMRI studies on humans. It always comes out that way. In most other cortical areas, the color response is somewhat bigger than the luminance response. Here V2, V3, V4, which is sometimes called the color area, and also in infrotemporal cortex, these are also sometimes called the color centers of the brain. Color is always a bit more responsive than luminance, but sort of the biggest difference is really in primary visual cortex. And there's only one area here, the middle temporal area, which is very different. They're luminance dominates, and that's sort of a tiny area that is well established as very important for motion processing. And their electrophysiology has also shown there's not much color there in MT. But if you want to come up with a color center anywhere else, it's sort of very difficult to say which area you would choose. And sort of just from the magnitude of the response, V1 would be the color center. But of course, V1 does everything, and I think so do all the other areas. So there's not much argument in calling one the color center over the others. But of course, there is more to color processing going on in the cortex. And now, before I've shown you, we had these oriented edges, but there's more stuff happening to the color signal. And for that, we and others looked at the responses of individual neurons in primary and secondary visual cortex. Here's again, for comparison, the distribution of preferred colors in the LGN or the retina. And we had these clusters around the cardinal directions. Now, when the same graph is made in visual cortex, we get a much larger spread of different preferred colors. That is, there's mechanisms sort of tuned to just about any color there. And interestingly, they're not all the same. But there are some of these cells that we looked at in area V2 sort of showed a very narrow tuning. So this is sort of the typical response of one of the linear cells as they exist in the LGN or the majority of cells in primary visual cortex. But some of these cells sort of give a very narrowly tuned response here to only particular tones of color. Here's basically, I'm showing what's shown here in a polar diagram. It's here shown on a Cartesian axis. And you can see here that sort of this widely tuned cell is very linear. The responses follow the sinusoid here, whereas the response of the other cell was very narrowly tuned and basically responded very selectively to this particular reddish tones. These cells occur basically in secondary visual cortex. There's a few of them in primary visual cortex, but as you go along, they tend to occur more and more frequently. Bevil Convoy recently has shown that in parts of infotemporal cortex, these are actually very common. Now, what would you do with cells that respond just to one particular color? They could be used for analyzing the visual scene. And if we look at the visual scene and objects in the visual scene, I've taken here an image with these colorful hats and some shadows here. And I've plotted a histogram of all the pixels. I've taken each pixel from this image and plotted it in color space. And I've plotted it with the luminance that it occurred on average here. And what you see is that each object basically forms this spike in a certain direction of color space. And now if you want to use these color cells or color luminance cells to segment the scene, then the ideal cell would be one that's sort of tuned very narrowly to a certain direction. And indeed, that's what we seem to have in our brain. Here's another example where sort of the scene is analyzed through sort of a variety of these narrowly tuned cells. And this shows us that using these narrowly tuned cells, you can segment this image very nicely into the different flowers and into the leaves. We've shown evidence for these narrowly tuned mechanisms that are sort of in different, in a whole variety of different directions of color space. Also in psychophysical experiments, but I'm going to skip over those now in the interest of time and get back to our diagram here. So what I've shown you now is this third stage of processing where sort of information from the retina is taken and then combined in many different ways to form these higher-order color mechanisms. And how we get from these to these elusive color categories, that's sort of the next step. And it's sort of a quite difficult step. There's been some people who started to look at the distribution of colors in even higher areas of the monkey brain. And recently, Bevel Conway claimed that he had found sort of a distribution similar to the distribution of unique hues that is found in human observers. But it was actually pointed out by John Mullen that that was really caused by an artifact and we sort of replicated that analysis and it's really not valid. The other question is of course whether, because those mechanisms are very tightly linked to language, whether monkeys even have these sort of unique hues or these categories the same way as we do. Okay, so looking at this picture that I presented in the beginning, I've showed you now what's approximately what's going on here. But of course the whole thing is much more complicated and there's many other interactions of color with other parts of the visual, not only of the visual cortex. For example, memory can affect the way we perceive color, so-called memory colors. If you look at the scene of fruits again and you always have the impression that the banana is yellow and the orange is orange. But sort of when I take the context away, you can see here very nicely that the color actually changes quite a bit from here, from reddish here to orange to greenish here. So you always see this as nice orange. And of course all the typical mechanisms of color constantly play a big role here, but recently we were also able to show that our knowledge about the color of objects can have an effect on our perception of the world here. Now to summarize, what I've shown you, color is processed very efficiently in the retina and color and form are processed together in the visual cortex, tightly linked, and there are specific color tuned mechanisms in visual cortex, the so-called higher order color mechanisms, and these mechanisms contribute to image segmentation. And lastly I'd like to thank the various current and previous members of my lab and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for funding all this research for many years. Particularly I'd like to thank Maria Olkonen, who's from Finland, a very promising young color vision scientist. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Gaurav. A splendid review of an awfully complicated area. You've made a case for essentially a disconnect between function and structure, loosely speaking. Would you have expected more evidence of structure reflecting function in the early levels of the visual cortex than you've actually found? The disconnect you're referring to is... Well, for example, the lack of correlation between orientation and color. Yes, so there are distinct functional streams in early visual cortex, that's what you're referring to. As you know, in the retina there are these three different channels, the magnocellular, parbocellular, and more recently the coniocellular layers have been found. And it's known that these work independently and convey information to visual cortex. So the very earliest implementation of this coloring book theory, as I call it, or you might call it, segregation of color and form theory, just claimed that the separation between magno and parbo is going through all the way in visual cortex. And then there's a sort of a dorsal stream in visual cortex where movement is analyzed that gets all its input from the magnocellular layers of the retina, and a ventral stream that gets all its inputs sort of from the parbocellular layers. Now, even on anatomical grounds, it's now quite clear that this is not the case. There is one tiny little area in the brain where it really seems to work like that, in that this motion area, MT, seems to get 90% of its input from magnocellular parts of the retina and the geniculate. But that's really a very, very small area. But all of the other areas seem the magno and parbocellular signals are already mixed in primary visual cortex. They end in different layers in V1, but then they're immediately sort of intermingled. But V4, for example, receives about half magnocellular and half parbocellular input. So in the first anatomical experiments that were done, it was really this sort of segregation that was put forward very clearly. But in later experiments, mostly by Sinkich and Horton, they found that there's lots of interactions between these different streams as they pass through visual cortex. So I would say there might be a little bit of segregation left, but it's true. I mean, anatomically, there is a bit of segregation left, but functionally, it doesn't seem to play any role anymore. It doesn't worry me. Next question. Just to know your opinion about the idea that evidences that are that far up to be an engine, but maybe edges up to be far as well. Well, if you have a mechanism in the brain or a neuron that responds whenever you have an edge with a certain color and luminance contrast, then you cannot really say, I mean, then you can always say, well, the edges help the color and the color help the edges, but the two are just put together. I mean, you cannot separate it. It's one and the same. That's the way I would see it. In terms of the edges help color, I mean, you might refer psychophysically to sort of filling in phenomena where sort of colors can propagate from the edges. That would certainly also be a, but I think that is filling in is a phenomenon that is works at a different level. Yeah, I mean, that's true. Of course, the contrast across edges is extremely can be extremely useful for for color constancy. I mean, that David has shown very clearly. I have some kind of unusual question about ethics and your research. So where does information come from when you're talking about monkey brains? I know already when we do psychovisual experiments with humans, it takes a lot of time. It's some kind of inhuman sometimes. So what about information from animals? Well, I mean, the monkey has been used a lot in physiology experiments because the visual system of these macaque monkeys is thought to be quite similar to those to that of humans. It's now clear sort of comparing especially functional imaging experiments in the monkey brain and in the human brain. But of course, as the higher the level you go, the more distinct the two become, not surprisingly. But I think at this early level of primary visual cortex, the brain is probably still quite similar to that of the monkeys. Did I understand your question correctly? I think that that would be a discussion that should probably take place somewhere else. But I think it can be stated that everything we've learned about cures of the visual system, we've learned from from these animal experiments. So far from the point where functional imaging would give us any new insights that would help us in curing diseases of the visual system. Thank you once more.
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The perception of color is a central component of primate vision. Color facilitates object perception and recognition, and plays an important role in scene segmentation and visual memory. Color vision starts with the absorption of light in three different types of light sensitive receptors in the eye, which convert electromagnetic energy into electrical signals, which in turn are transformed into action potentials by a complicated network of cells in the retina. The information is sent to the visual cortex via three independent channels with different chromatic preferences. In the cortex, information from these channels is mixed to enable perception of a large variety of different hues. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that color analysis and coding cannot be separated from the analysis and coding of other visual attributes such as form and motion. While there are some brain areas that are more sensitive to color than others, color vision emerges through the combined activity of neurons in many different areas.
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10.5446/18257 (DOI)
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So to overcome this problem, you apply the variance stabilization scheme when we transfer our data in such a form when the noise can be considered now close to Gaussian IID. Then we apply our filter, perform the noising, and then apply inverse transformation to get the final estimate. So in detail this can be found in the paper of Alessandra Foy. And here is just some results. We used the images from the multispectral image database by Harley, Finlayson and Morović. And it's available in the Internet. And here you see the one of the component of the images. So this is the noisy image. This what we will get if we would use the global principal component. And here if we will use our proposed method. So if the company VPCA will be calculated for each group individually. Here is another example. So you see that here Pax is almost unreadable. Here at least one can read your day. There's a conclusion. We have introduced a new algorithm for multispectral image denoising following the non-local image processing paradigm. A specially adaptive spectral correlation is performed for each group of similar blocks. Thanks to the grouping, the PPCA transform can be calculated robustly directly from the noisy image. Effectist spectral correlation allows to achieve higher specification of the data, which results in better denoising. Experiment shows a priority of the proposed approach over the method using global spectral correlation. Thank you. I did not say much about how similar what is this notion of similarity between the blocks that you try to fit and list. And we talked later on about using only the luminance. Because it contains all the structures. Sorry, you got. I can go back if you need some slides. If you can just say few words about this notion of similarity between the blocks. Basically, like L2 norm. We are using, normally we use Euclidean L2 norm to find the similarity. And what we are doing, we are just selecting like first 16 or 32 or how many similar blocks that we need. And this can be calculated for the RGB images we are calculating in luminance, because when you do the transformation from RGB to luminance, luminance becomes less noisy. So it is reasonable to do it. In case of the multispectral images, we did it directly on these 3D image patches. Because for the multispectral image we have the special location and the spectral component. So we computed on all these 3D cubes. So we used, basically in calculating the Euclidean distance we used all the spectral components. Because there we cannot give the priority to any of them. Thank you again.
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We propose a new algorithm for multispectral image denoising. The algorithm is based on the state-of-the-art Block Matching 3-D filter. For each “reference” 3-D block of multispectral data (sub-array of pixels from spatial and spectral locations) we find similar 3-D blocks using block matching and group them together to form a set of 4-D groups of pixels in spatial (2-D), spectral (1-D) and “temporal matched” (1-D) directions. Each of these groups is transformed using 4-D separable transforms formed by a fixed 2-D transform in spatial coordinates, a fixed 1-D transform in “temporal” coordinate, and 1-D PCA transform in spectral coordinates. Denoising is performed by shrinking these 4-D spectral components, applying an inverse 4-D transform to obtain estimates for all 4-D blocks and aggregating all estimates together. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on the denoising of real images captured with multispectral camera.
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10.5446/18263 (DOI)
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Good morning everybody. Welcome to my presentation on extending surf to the color domain. As it's said already, it's authored by three people and we all come from the University of Koblenz Landau which is located at the Rhine and the Mosul River in Germany. The outline of my talk is as usual we have an introduction as state of the art and then I'll tell you about extending surf which is a feature detector to the color domain. The question is how to evaluate results and I give some ideas and some discussion of how to evaluate such feature detectors in general. I show you several pages of results and given conclusion and if there is time and if there are questions I can go into details on color boosting and surf which otherwise I will have to skip due to time. In object recognition that's the area that I'm working in in computer vision. We have a new tendency which is towards local features. People detect features in image space and very quickly find them again in different views of the same object. This has been introduced by Loewe in 2004 in the well-known SIFT operator but there have been different approaches following his idea especially since SIFT is copyrighted and licensed. People try to find alternatives to that. So what you see here is surf features basically you don't really see it. It's a vector showing features which are located on that cup. This is a very quick method of finding objects. You can even do SIFT or surf in real time especially if you have the copyrighted licensed versions. The surf features are some of the ideas that have been proposed later in 2006 by Austrian, Swiss, Belgian cooperation. Well three people proposing that as far as I remember. And they propose a feature detector which is invariant to certain geometric operations which are rotation scaling and also to illumination changes. It has a very fast computation. It has a distinctive feature vector which can be easily found with a quick operation. And there are several open source implementations which we have tested and they all give comparable results. The open source implementations of course don't have to be paid for. I cannot introduce the whole surf theory because that will take a separate talk. For those who do not know, in basic principle what is computed is something like hard wavelets in a scale space and it requires to compute gradients and determinants of Hessians and this is done in different scales. And this is all very smartly combined to get normally a feature vector of length 64 which can be quickly found in different views. So the only problem is that surf as well as SIFT originally work on just great scale images which is partially due to the fact that they want to do the whole thing in real time. So the fewer operations that you have to do, the better. But as you all know, the word is different. And the question is whether we can extend surf of SIFT features to color images without tripling the effort because tripling the effort would certainly be too much penalty for real time operations. So just an idea of how the results look like. Basically the detectors give you a point detector which has now a scale. So the points have some size, a blob size depending on the scale where they are detected. This is actually already a result that we did on the right side. We see the gray scale surf operation and on the left one it's the same surf operation in color space. The questions behind that idea are how can we do such an extension? There's two parts of the descriptors that have to be looked at. There's a detection step and there's also the question how to find the features accurately again in the images. And these are two different issues. So for the two questions we have to discuss different options. People did discuss those questions already for SIFT. So the SIFT features are already extended to color by different people with different methods, which I don't want to discuss in all details, but there's a short section on that in the paper summarizing what their ideas were. Now what we did is trying to summarize what they did and get the best options to do the same thing in surf. The first thing that we need to do is to find appropriate color spaces so that we can do the whole thing quickly. We decided to have different color spaces which all separate intensity from color information. And as it has to be done quickly, we have to do it or we did it all in linear conversion from RGB spaces so that all the operations basically were still linear operations. So we checked different color spaces which all have those properties. So one channel is intensity and the others are basically color. So what we evaluated is YCBCR, Gaussian color space, normalized RGB, intensity normalized RGB, and opponent color spaces as they were proposed by Wider. The idea of integrating color also introduces the idea of new invariance. So we want invariance with respect to some color properties. So what we did, we had some assumption on the color generation process which we see here. The normal equation we see or part is here, the normal term, and we have some additional diffuse omnidirectional illumination that gives us some disturbance on the color. From those images in the image channel K, we now do scale spaces. So each color channel is convolved with a Gaussian to get different resolution. So this is done in different color channels separately and many photometric invariance have been proposed for such images already. We use those who work in scale space because that really nicely corresponds to their surf properties. So each of the color channels will be now down sample and smooth and we use the two invariance that were proposed by the people shown here on the slide. The invariance are the W invariant which is quotient of the intensity channel by the smoothed first derivative of the color channels. And you do that in the first and the second derivative. And that is shown to be invariant to local intensity changes if you have planar objects. These color invariance are now again further computed to take again the derivative, the C invariant basically is the first derivative of the W invariant. And this one again you compute the second derivative of that. So you have now various options to compute first and second derivatives which you can now use instead of the Hessians that you use in the surf features. In analogy to that you compute those values and these substitute the values in the Hessians for the surf of surf features if you want. Now we have the three color channels or two color channels plus intensity. Now the question is how to integrate those formula into one large detector. There are several options that you can choose from. You can either do the search in each channel separately and then find the feature points in each channel and combine them later on, eliminating multiple detections. Or you can try to do the whole thing in a vector way that means you combine the three color channel to a vector and then compute all the values vector valued. And then this basically means that you compute the Hessians and sum up the values of the three color channels because it's all linear. These two options give you slightly different results. The next thing that you might consider is do we have to use the same resolution or scale in intensity and in color channels? As we need to save as many operations as we can, we try to minimize the number of operations which means that we did experiments with reduced resolution in the color channel with respect to the intensity channel. So we kept the intensity channel with the original descriptor and then tried sampling the color channels differently. What the operator does is it computes the features that are wafeless in some windows in some area, in some neighborhood, and we tried whether we can reduce the number of windows for the computation. And it turned out that it's sufficient to have two by two windows, meaning four sub-windows, rather than 16 which are usually used for the intensity channel and the results are still approximately the same. Which means that we have only a quarter of the number of features for the two color channels, so 62 plus 16 plus 16 making up in some 96 features for the color vector. This is the vector that we operated on and which we used usually. The question is now how to evaluate such a framework or such a detector. We checked different approaches shown in the literature and there was one that we found here which is relatively well known. It shows the graffiti scene and the camera is moved in front of the graffiti scene. And the viewpoints are all known. It's zoomed and rotated. It's blurred. It has some JPEG compression which is known so we can check for JPEG artifacts and it also has over and under exposure, all well documented. The idea is to use that for object recognition evaluation in such a way that for each image that is now taken from different viewpoints, you cut out a small area for which you now know the homography relating one image to the other. So if you now have two overlapping images, one related by the other by a homography, you can compute the feature points and check the number of feature points that matches the number in the other one. And this is for planner object exactly what you want to do if you do object recognition. So you don't have to compute point by point or feature by feature differences, you just compute the area of overlapping homographies. From that you can then derive measures of how well one feature detector will perform after some geometric transformation as well as all the other transformations that were provided in the database. Again, this is nothing that we have invented. This was also documented by other people who did experiments on that database. But we use that for our surf implementation. The other framework that is commonly used is the alloy database which has a moving camera and also moving illumination. So we know the illumination and we also know the camera position. But for object recognition, well, this is different, this is 3D objects, but they are all in front of a homogeneous background. So it's a different complexity. So let's get to the results. One question is how well the thing repeats over different experiments. The plots are somehow, well, as usual plots are difficult to read. What you see here, this is on the alloy database moving the light direction from plus 30 degrees to minus 30 degrees. And you have the different versions of combinations of surf with color and without invariance and without invariance. We also tried to do just a simple surf on the three color channels without integrating color invariance properties. So what we can conclude from that graph is that the larger the derivation of the light direction is, the more it makes sense to have operators that integrate color and invariance properties. The difference here is about 5% points from the worst to the best detector. The worst is 40% at that point here, which is a normal surf, whereas this one is a surf integrating color and invariance properties. So of course, this is only one of the results and there are many of those graphs printed in the paper. Unfortunately, the same effect is not always true. This is using now the other database, the gravity database, but fortunately, at least it doesn't get worse. I mean, you don't really lose precision if you use color in such a framework. So especially if you have, we found out, especially if the images have JPEG compression, the features didn't seem to perform that well, which the experts in compression certainly can explain. The other problem is how to evaluate the orientation correctness, which is not taken into account by most of the other people who did comparisons of frameworks. It's not that simple to explain. The operator, the surf and the sift operators, they have orientation histograms that are somehow coded into that feature vector. And there needs to be a measure on the distance of those histograms. Of course, you can do the comparison only on the results of the object recognition, but we try to do it on the feature vector directly. So to show you or to tell you the results, if we use the three invariants that I showed earlier, we get improved results on the alloy database, which is the object recognition database, which is commonly used. And the results are not as good as the intensity only data on the graphically seen, but the difference are negligible. So we did more invariants. We tried different invariants, and we see that they give those notable differences and increase in recognition rate. We also did color boosting, which was proposed by other people for sift, basically limiting the intensity channel and extending the color information. And that gave only a little increase in our case. So we skipped that again. We chose different color spaces, and basically it didn't make a big difference, which to me is natural because they're all linear transformations and we work on derivatives of the linear transformation, so that doesn't make a big difference. I'll finish in a second. So what I've shown now is color surf. There's only little computational overhead required, so we can still do it in real time. We can show by our experiments that that extension increases the distinctiveness. It's better for 3D object recognition, and I also tried to show you some of the ideas on discussion of evaluation criteria. So to summarize, why am I doing the whole thing? This is Lisa. You'll find Lisa on Facebook if you want. That's my Robert. He was doing fetch and carry services, and Lisa in real time finds objects, learns objects based on color surf features, and the results show that we get 25% increase in recognition rate and detection. Thank you very much. Questions? Microphone. So you did some interest point detection? Yes, basically. Surf is interest point detector. You select first the interest points? For what? For object recognition? You have to select the areas where you extract the surf, right? What kind of sampling do you use for the surf? What kind of what? Which points do you select in your image? I don't select points. I mean, I learn an object, I get a bunch of selected points, which I just store for the object, and then I search for those objects in the scene. If you want to extract the surf descriptor, on which location do you compute this in your image? In the tests or for just finding objects? Finding objects. For finding objects, well, Lisa usually gets an object presented in front of the camera, and it's told this is the object that you have to look for, and then it computes the surf features from that. From the whole image? Well, it first gets the background, then it gets the object, that's the difference, and then it knows where the object is. So this is all done in real time. It's compute from the whole object? Yes, from the whole object, and then has the whole set of feature vectors which are stored and then located again. Okay, because normally it is done on the interest points? Yes, but it's all interest points. I mean, it computes about 64 image points for one object. 64 to something, 100. Another question maybe? No? Yeah, it is so fun. Okay, so what we have seen is that you, well, normally in SIFT you do a normalization on the gradients, which includes a photometric invariance. So, or you transform color space into an invariant color space, like the scene invariant. But the SIFT and the surf also includes some normalization, which also have an effect on the photometric invariance. Did you notice this? Yes, but the simple surf does it on intensity. Simple surf features only in the intensity channel. It has the illuminant invariance, that's right. Yeah, we do also in the surf we do normalization on the gradient orientation and the gradients. Yes, the same thing is done in the color channels, of course. I mean, you have the orientation adjustment to the orientation histogram. Okay. Thank you.
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Automatic extraction of local features from images plays an important role in many computer vision tasks. During the last years, much focus has been put on making the features invariant to geometric transformations such as a rotation and scaling of the image. Recently, some work has been published concerning the integration of color information into the detection and description step of SIFT. In various evaluations, it has been shown that including color information can increase distinctiveness and invariance to photometric transformations caused by illumination changes. In this paper we build on the results from these approaches and apply them to the SURF descriptor, which is advantageous compared to SIFT in terms of speed, making it a perfect candidate for online applications, for example in the field of robotics. Our results show significant improvements concerning the repeatability and destinctiveness of SURF for 3D objects under varying illumination directions. In contrast to many other evaluations we also determine the accuracy of the orientation assignment and include this into our comparisons.
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10.5446/18265 (DOI)
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Donc, premièrement, merci Roger pour ma introduction. Donc, pour caractériser un printé, la relation entre les inputs et les résultats de la couleur d'outre doit être établie. Une approche consiste en utilisant un modèle de production spectraal. Donc, le bénéfice de utiliser un modèle de production spectraal est que le printé peut être caractéré comme fonction de la procédure de printé physique par la mette comme le papier de réflectance, le transmittance de la haine, le gain, etc. Donc, en utilisant un modèle de production spectraal on peut, pour exemple, obtenir les quantités de haine pour printé la couleur des décor. Donc, comme vous le savez, les modèles de production spectraal sont, pour exemple, le modèle claperéon ou le modèle unison. Et dans le travail précédent, nous avons shown que le modèle unison peut être élevé par prendre en compte le phénomène de la haine. Et maintenant, ce qui est nouveau est que nous introduisons des facteurs et des dépenants de haine dans le modèle unison qui compte pour les propres mécaniques et de propres optiques de ces haines. Comme, pour exemple, les propres dépenants de la combination de papier et de haine ou les profils de la haine de la haine. Donc, quand nous voulons caractériser un printé nous avons, comme l'input, les incorégies denominées. Et puis, nous pouvons utiliser un modèle de production spectraal ou, pour exemple, le modèle unison pour prédire la réflectance spectraale de la couleur de la haine, en other words, le colorisation d'outils résultats. Depuis que nous avons utilisé les incorégies denominées dans le modèle unison, nous avons souvent obtenu deux accursions de production. Nous avons développé un modèle de production inks que nous installons sur le modèle unison. Donc, les incorégies et les curaux sont établies pour apporter les incorégies denominées et les effectives incorégies. En other words, les amounts de incorégies sont vraiment printés. Et de cette façon, la production accueillie de la modèle unison est significativement增ée. Donc, dans la version précédente de notre modèle, pour la combination de printé, papier, inc et de l'algorithme de la haine, pour chaque bleu de couleur que nous avons préditée, nous avons utilisé seulement un facteur et un single. Et maintenant, ce qui est nouveau, c'est que pour la même combination pour chaque bleu de couleur de couleur, nous compuions un facteur optimal qui dépend de les propres mécaniques et de l'optique de la haine et de l'amont des incs qui sont présents dans la haine. Donc, quelques mots sur le contenu. Tout d'abord, je vais introduire des phénomènes physiques qui sont à cause du processus de printé. Et puis, je vais présenter l'enquête de l'enquête de la haine en unison spectraal de production. Et parce que c'est un modèle complexe, je vais prendre un peu de temps. Et après ça, je vais montrer comment introduire un facteur et le dépenant dans le modèle unison. Et je vais conclure par la production d'accuréances de ces deux modèles. Donc, en effet, la lumière reflète de la haine de couleur est donnée par la lumière qui va au côté de l'inc, pour exécuter de cette haine. Plus la lumière qui est simplement reflète par le papier. Mais, par la propreté de la haine et de la combination de la haine, quelque part de la lumière qui va au côté de l'inc peut être, en nombre de temps, reflète et reflète pour exécuter de la haine, pour éclater plus d'absorption de la haine. Et ce phénomène est connu par la propagation latéral de la haine. En plus, en 2010, Ebert et Heche ont montré que les profils de la haine de la haine de la haine ont un impact sur la interaction entre le papier, le zinc et la lumière. Donc, quand un dot de la haine est printé sur le papier, on généralement observe plus d'effectifs de la couverture que de la couverture nominale. Quand le même dot de la haine est printé ou superpôtu avec un autre solide de la haine, on généralement observe différents phénomènes de la haine. En fait, le phénomène de la haine dépend de la condition de la condition de la position de la haine. C'est différent quand un solide est printé sur le papier, superpôte avec un solide, un autre solide ou deux solides, pour exemple. Donc, le modèle unison est utilisé pour prédiquer les réflections spectrailles de la couleur de la haine en attendant un peu de la couleur de la couverture et de leurs réflections spectrailles. En plus, un autre point exponentiel, donc le facteur unison est utilisé pour modéliser la relation non-linear entre ces effets et la couverture spectraille de la couleur de la couleur. Donc, en en prendre un petit look à cette formule, afin d'improver la précision de la durée, on se trouve que le nombre de mesures de la couleur a été mises en mesure. On peut voir que nous pouvons jouer seulement avec deux types de paramètres. Donc, le premier est le facteur unison et il est principalement dépendant de la gamme optical comme la scatteration latéral de la lumière. Et les autres paramètres sont les effets de la couleur et ils sont principalement dépendant de la fenêtre de la couverture ou d'autres paramètres sur le point physique. Donc, pour les remarques, je voudrais dire que, techniquement, on dit que les effets de couverture sont dépendant de la gamme optical et le facteur unison dépendant de la gamme optical. Mais en fait, il y a un trait de entre ces deux points de gamme. Donc, le facteur unison impacte les effets de couverture. Donc, dans le modèle EYNSN, pour obtenir une augmentation de la production, nous compuissons les effets de couverture enceintes. Et puis, en assumant indépendant, printé, cyan, magenta et enceintes, nous pouvons computer les effets de couverture de la couleur avec l'équation de Michel et après ça, nous pouvons prédire la réflectance spectuelle de cette couleur en demi-ton avec le modèle unison. Donc, pour obtenir les effets de couverture dans le modèle EYNSN, nous établissons la couverture de couverture enceintes pour les effets de couverture. Donc, la figure gauche illustre la couverture de couverture enceinte quand la couverture est printée en papier pour un printé de 150 lpi. Et comme vous pouvez le voir, par rapport à l'inquiétude phénomène de la haute-incre, en fait, à 50% de la couverture nous avons 60% d'effectifs de la couverture de cette haute-incre. Une autre façon de l'expérimenter l'inquiétude phénomène de la haute-incre est d'utiliser la curve dot-gain, où la curve dot-gain est simplement définie par l'effectif minus de la couverture nominale. Donc, sur le solide sur la figure droite, on a la curve de la curve pour la même haute-incre. Quand la curve de la haute-incre est printée en papier, et les trois autres curves représentent la curve de la curve de la haute-incre quand la curve de la haute-incre est printée sur le solide de la colorentine de l'olive sur le solide de la colorentine de la magenta ou sur le superpose de la magenta et de la solide de la colorentine de la magenta. Et, comme vous pouvez le voir, l'inquiétude phénomène a un condition de superposition de la haute-incre. C'est différent quand un haute-incre est superposed en papier, sur le solide de la colorentine de la colorentine ou sur le solide de la colorentine de la colorentine de la magenta. Et, pour le modèle EYNSL, nous compuying pour chaque haute-incre dans chaque condition de superposition de la curve de la haute-incre. Donc, pour un système de trois magentins, magenta et de la colorentine de la magenta, nous avons obtenu 12 curves de la haute-incre. Et maintenant, le challenge est comment obtenir les infétences efficaces de toutes ces inféctions de la colorentine de la magenta. Et si nous focusons sur le cas de la haute-incre, la coverage de la haute-incre est simplement dégagée par attendre la curve de la haute-incre par la proportion apparaissante dans la haute-incre. Et cette proportion est simplement dégagée par la question de Michel. Par exemple, la proportion de yellow qui est printée en papier seulement est simplement dégagée par la proportion quand il n'y a pas de cyan en fois de la proportion quand il n'y a pas de magenta. Et dans le même manière, nous pouvons obtenir les effets pour les inféctions de cyan et magenta. Donc, enfin, nous pouvons compter les modèles. Donc, à la calibration de modèles, nous compterons pour chaque haute-incre dans chaque condition de position de la haute-incre et puis, pour prédiciter la réflectance spectuelle de la colorentine, nous devons déterminer les inféctions dans les inféctions d'affections par les utilisations de la question que je vous ai présentées. Et puis, nous devons déterminer les inféctions par les inféctions de la colorentine avec l'équation unison. Donc, le facteur de la fin qui est choisi dans cette version de la modèles est celui qui minimise l'erreur de la production spectuelle. Donc, ce que nous faisons pour obtenir cet effecteur optimal, nous simplifiant par les inféctions typiquement dans la colorentine et puis, nous avons déterminé la production spectuelle par toutes les tests. Le facteur de la fin qui donne le meilleur effecteur de la production spectuelle est celui que nous prenons pour la production spectuelle. Donc, comme vous avez déjà vu, dans la modèles de la modèles de la fin de la production de la production spectuelle, nous prenons le facteur de la production spectuelle que les inféctions typiquement sont plus diffusées que les inféctions typiquement. En plus, nous savons que les profils de la fin de la fin de la fin peuvent être différents parce qu'ils dépendent de les propriétés mécaniques de la fin de la fin de la viscosité ou de la tension de la fin de la surface. Nous observons que ce modèle EYSN ne est pas bien prédictifiant, et que ce modèle est un peu plus élevé que l'EYSN. Et donc, nous conclons qu'il y a un besoin d'introduire un facteur spécifique pour chaque EYSN dans le modèle EYSN. Donc, cette figure illustre le modèle de production spectuelle de la production spectuelle pour un EYSN qui est printé en papier. Nous avons le modèle EYSN en erreur de production spectuelle pour un EYSN entre 0 et 0.25. Et donc, quand nous fixons trois différents facteurs et comme vous pouvez le voir pour les préjudiciant la réflections spectuelles de cette couleur de la faute nous devons utiliser un facteur EYSN 14 parce que choisir ce facteur EYSN et les répliquer a un petit erreur de production spectuelle de seulement 0.54. Et en fait, le facteur EYSN que nous devons utiliser est un facteur EYSN parce que si nous fixons ce facteur EYSN et nous essayons après ça de fixer le point de vue, nous pouvons obtenir une erreur de production vraiment mal de 3.60. Et au contraire, si nous faisons le même expériment pour un 50% de la haute haute haute et que nous avons printé sur le papier, nous pouvons voir que, en ce cas, le meilleur facteur que nous devons utiliser est en fait un. Et le meilleur facteur que nous devons avoir à l'utiliser est un facteur EYSN 14. Donc, quelle est la figure qui illustre? Donc, le meilleur facteur pour prévoir un halftone est en fait le meilleur facteur pour prévoir un bleu-jeu-jeu-alftone et au contraire, le meilleur facteur pour prévoir un bleu-jeu-alftone est en fait le meilleur facteur pour prévoir un halftone de cyan. Donc, la question est comment nous ménagons quand nous voulons prévoir un bleu-jeu-alftone comprise ces deux oeufs. Et je peux vous donner un élément de solution donc, quand nous prévons un bleu-jeu-alftone comprise plus de cyan-oink que de bleu-jeu-alftone on préfère utiliser un facteur EYSN qui est près de 14. Et pour prévoir un halftone comprise plus de bleu-jeu-alftone que de cyan-ink on préfère utiliser un facteur EYSN qui est près de 1. Donc, comment nous le faisons? Pour compter un facteur optimal pour chaque bleu-jeu-alftone nous simplement attendons le meilleur facteur EYSN par une fonction de détermination pour trouver une fonction de détermination nous connaissons en fait deux choses importantes. La première chose est que le facteur EYSN n'a pas de impact sur l'horreur de la production spectraal quand nous prévons les colorants. La deuxième chose est que le facteur EYSN a un impact néanélié de 50 % de la production numérique et pour cela, nous pouvons utiliser 0 valeur à 0 % de la production numérique et pour cela, nous pouvons évaluer un maximum de valeur de 1 % de la production numérique et pour le final, nous compute pour chaque bleu-jeu-alftone un facteur optimal en attendant le facteur EYSN par une fonction parfaite de leur production numérique. Donc, maintenant, nous avons tout à faire pour construire le modèle de la production numérique. Pour la calibration de modèle, nous évaluons le facteur EYSN par le fait que le 50 % de bleu-jeu-alftone soit printé sur le papier et nous prenons pour le facteur EYSN celui qui minimise l'horreur de la production numérique. Et dans la deuxième étape, nous iterons et nous passons par le facteur EYSN pour l'instant 1 et 14 nous compute le point optimal d'une gamme qui sera utilisée pour déterminer toutes les curves de l'incorporation. Et puis, à la fin de la journée, quand nous prévons la réflectance spectrable de la bleu-jeu-alftone, nous compute un facteur optimal des réglages de l'incorporation. Et puis, nous pouvons obtenir les valeurs de la gamme de l'incorporation de la table de l'exploitation et de cette valeur, nous pouvons réglager toutes les functions de l'incorporation. Et puis, le reste de la production spectrable suivait le même point que nous avec le modèle de production spectrable de l'incorporation. Donc, pour montrer la production de l'accurice, nous avons printé 125 uniformes tests de test, donc, par avoir une variation numérique de 25 % pour les 3 tests que nous avons utilisé. Nous avons utilisé l'incorporation standard un magenta inc et un yellow inc et la métrique est simplement définie comme une différence de Delta E94 entre les samples de tests de tests de test de tests. Donc, le modèle que nous considérons est le modèle EYSN, donc, quand nous utilisons l'incorporation standard donc, quand nous compute un facteur optimal pour chaque couleur de couleur et en addition, nous créons un modèle de la modèles de la réalité grand il est utilisé en fait pour valider le modèle de la modèles de l'incorporation standard. Donc, en lieu de computer un facteur optimal pour chaque couleur de couleur, nous avons simplement jointement refitir ces facteurs optimaux et les surfaces de surface qui font la meilleure production de la même couleur. Donc, sur la surface de cette figure, vous avez la même quantité de quantité de acrobatie Delta E94 pour les 3 modèles considérés. Donc, le modèle de single and factor et le modèle de l'incorporation et le modèle de la réalité grand c'est pas un modèle parce que nous refitons tout. Donc, par comparer le modèle de single and factor avec le modèle de l'incorporation et le modèle de factor qui est une improvement de 1.25 à 1.08 et ce est pour vous des différents mécaniques et des propres optiques entre le cyan, le modèle standard et le délai de fluorescent et par comparer le modèle de l'incorporation et le modèle de l'incorporation avec le modèle de la réalité grand nous pouvons voir que nous avons seulement une différence de 0.02 et ce qui doit être illustré de la façon dont nous compute le modèle optimal et le facteur est en fait le plus proche de la meilleure achèvement. Donc, pour conclure nous proposons un modèle de l'incorporation et le modèle de l'incorporation qui compte pour les propres optiques de l'incorporation En plus, il a augmenté la décision d'accrobaties pour l'incorporation avec différentes propres mécaniques et optiques et parce que nous avons conducté d'autres tests avec d'autres conditions de printement et d'autres printers à notre lab nous avons vu que cela toujours improve la précision même si parfois l'improvement pourrait être très petit en particulier pour l'incorporation avec les propres optiques et mécaniques donc ces extensions donnent plus de flexibilité pour le modèle de l'incorporation et les époux. Merci Romain pour cette présentation S'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît en question, ces remarques Oui, Peter?... Et en fait, nous avons le... Je vais penser à cela. Nous avons le facteur unicien. Et en plus, nous établissons les curves de la courbe de la haute. Donc les autres paramètres sont les couvertures efficaces que nous ferons pour chaque inc dans chaque condition de position supérieure. En fait, c'est 12. 12 plus 1 equals 13 paramètres. Je vais poser des questions. Oui? Juste pour vous, vous avez dit que l'avantage de l'aéroport ou l'aéroport de la courbe de la haute c'est que les éroportes maximum sont les plus éroportes. Ok, donc... Parce que j'ai accepté, à la fin de la journée, que je n'ai pas mis à l'aéroport. Mais nous avons le même comportement. Donc, l'avantage maximum est l'improvement, le quantité de 95, tout dans la même scale. Qu'est-ce qu'il y a avec la courbe de la haute? Le quantité de 95. Ok, donc si je me souviens, le valeur maximum est à 3.5, quelque chose comme ça, 3.3. Et le quantité de 95 est près de 2. Mais je ne suis pas sûr de ce que ce soit entre ces valeurs. Je vous ai demandé des questions. Ok. Merci, bienvenue.
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Different inks may have different mechanical and/or optical properties. Existing Yule-Nielsen modified Neugebauer spectral prediction models assume however that the inks forming a color halftone behave similarly, i.e. that a single n-factor can model the lateral propagation of light within the paper as well as non-uniformities of the ink dot thickness profiles. However, if the inks have very different optical or mechanical properties, each ink may be separately modeled with its specific n-factor. In order to predict the reflection spectrum of such color halftones, we extend the ink spreading enhanced Yule-Nielsen modified spectral Neugebauer (EYNSN) model by calculating for each halftone an optimal n-factor as an average of the ink specific n-factors weighted by a parabolic function of the ink surface coverages. We compare the prediction accuracies of the standard EYNSN model where each halftone is predicted by making use of one global n-factor with the predictions accuracies of the extended EYNSN model where each halftone is predicted with its corresponding optimal n-factor derived from the individual ink-specific n-factors. For inks having very different optical and/or mechanical properties, we observe an improvement of the prediction accuracies.
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10.5446/18266 (DOI)
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Thank you very much. I want to apologize for the delay. I wanted to use the computer of my wife, but I think that she prepares a plot against me. So sorry. The aim of my research is to try to improve the image, the JPEC compression, applying a method of color perception. But what is the problem in JPEC 2000 or any algorithm of compression? The problem is that just information theory criteria are applied. So when we send the bits to the decoder, we send first the most important bits of the most important coefficients. So it produce visible artifacts, since important perceptual information is discarded. Then our solution is not used. The information theory criteria is used perceptual criteria. And we need a color perception model which quantize the coefficients perceptually. And the chromatic induction wavelet model is suitable for it, or C1. But what is C1? C1, first of all, decompose the image in different wavelet planes and different spatial orientations. So with these coefficients, try to emulate some features of the human visual system, applying a weighting function. In this case, it's the C prime of the entire image, but the residual plane. So C1 combined three important features. That is spatial orientation, spatial frequency, and surround contrast. When we quantize these coefficients, we obtain a matrix with weighted coefficient, I want to say. So with these coefficients, if we decontize, excuse me, inverse wavelet transform, we obtain an image that is the representation that is forming in our brain. In these cases, a LENA image looks at two methods. I want to present through examples how works B1. In these cases, for grayscale images, the question is, what is the brightest rectangle here? We know this example, but obviously are the same, since the rectangle B is surrounded by darker checkers, while the rectangle A is surrounded by brighter checkers. So in a column brightness profile, C1 predicts that is the dash function, that the rectangle A is darker than the rectangle B, while the digital values, that is the continuous function, said that have the same color. In this case, C1 tried to predict what is the color that we perceive. And in these cases, it's a grayscale. But in color, this is the example for color, and the question is, what is the color of the tiles? The tile at the top is a darker brown, and the tile at the side is orange, but it's just our perceptual reality. But the physical reality says that it's the same darker brown color. So we can say that our brain is save us. Briefly, C1 tried to predict what I said, taking into account all the neighborhood. So in this case, the first tile, the darker, the brown, I won't say. The brown is almost the same, but the other one, the tile at the side, because it's inside a shadow, we, the C1 predicts that is almost orange. Going back with our problem, in the entire process, this is the general block for JPEG 2000 in color, but it's important to say that just the quantization is the block that introduced distortion in the process. Since we reduce the dynamic range just dividing by a number, which is called the quantization step, it's just a waiting. It's a fixed waiting. So the standard JPEG 2000 includes some visual frequency waiting, but it's just for an entire subband. In this case, we try to depict that in an entire band, apply the same value. So it's not important to transmit, because both sides know this value. But our proposal is to introduce, previously to the quantization step, introduce a block of C1, which produce one wait by any coefficient. So in this case, it's lean at 400 dots per inch, and we know the difference. We say that JPEG 2000 is global, because it's for an entire subband, and our approach is for a single coefficient. The problem is that we don't know what is the value, because it depends on the distance and for the image, too. Our results was tested of all these 16 images obtained from the image database of the University of Southern California. And I present, first of all, three individual results. For example, in this case, the image at the left, the JPEG 2000 has better numerical quality, since in this case, it's 31 decibels. And the other one, in our results, we have 27. But you can see that there are a lot of artifacts in the edges, and our image is soft. The result is because to pick signal to noise radio, check just pixel by pixel the difference, not global. So in this case, we change quantizing, or we change weighting every coefficient. So we change the statistical properties of the image. So that's why we obtain this kind of image. Even we have less numerical quality, we have better perceptual quality. The same result we obtained, for example, in this image, the airplane. And we can say that, for example, the shape of the montage here is imperceivable, and here is the shape of the mountains. We can see also the letters in the airplane. There are some special cases, like in this image, like Babun, that we obtain better, both compression ratio and perceptual quality. This image is with the same numerical quality. So we have the same numerical quality, but better perceptual quality. And we can say that the JPEG 2000 image have some visible artifacts. On average, this figure represents, in the horizontal axis, a set of coefficients that we select by a certain threshold. In this case, 32, 16, 8, and so on. And this is the horizontal. The vertical is the amount of bits that now, on average, are pixelated represented. So for example, at the last bit plane, we have almost six bits per pixel. The original pixel was 24 bit depth, so we reduce. The blue function is the result obtained by JPEG 2000. And the green one is the result obtained by our approach. So we can say that the lower the function, the better the compression, because we need less bits to represent the same coefficients. So our ongoing work, which is not included in the proceedings, is to try to predict with this when we receive this image, this soft image, try to predict what were the weightings that we apply. So we obtain, for example, that it's almost the same numerical quality, but we have better perceptual one at the same bit rate. We try to combine another entropy colors. And with this entropy color, we obtain better results, both subjectic and objectic quality. So in conclusion, SIGWAM perceptual quantization compressed more or less 20% higher. The numerical quality is worse, but the perceptual quality is better. So when we introduce the inverse perceptual quantization, we can obtain both numerical and perceptual quality. Thanks for your attention. Muchas gracias. Thank you. OK. Thank you. Just one announcement before we go to the questions. We have some practical announcements from the hosts, so don't leave immediately when we finish with the questions. OK. Now if we have questions, we have five minutes, maybe to answer them. OK. Do we have one here? And thank you for the nice talk. Have you conducted any psychophysical tests to judge the performance of the method? No, not yet. Not yet, just with our partners of the group. But for more people, we don't try these images. Do you compare your work with other usual waiting that like not know from the rest? Waiting, for example? I can't hear you. Excuse me. OK. Do you compare your work with other usual waiting of GPAC 2000, like, for example, the first one, not know waiting? No. Not know from EPFL? What? It was the first to propose some waiting in GPAC 2000? No, we don't compare our results with this. We try to improve the quantization. But we don't try. We don't prove with another. But there are a lot of other proposals for such kind of waiting. Yeah, no, we don't know. We have time for more questions. OK. So thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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The aim of this work is to explain how to apply perceptual concepts to define a perceptual pre-quantizer and to improve JPEG2000 compressor. The approach consists in quantizing wavelet transform coefficients using some of the human visual system behavior properties. Noise is fatal to image compression performance, because it can be both annoying for the observer and consumes excessive bandwidth when the imagery is transmitted. Perceptual pre-quantization reduces unperceivable details and thus improve both visual impression and transmission properties. The comparison between JPEG2000 without and with perceptual pre-quantization shows that the latter is not favorable in PSNR, but the recovered image is more compressed at the same or even better visual quality measured with a weighted PSNR. Perceptual criteria were taken from the CIWaM (Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model).
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10.5446/18267 (DOI)
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Good afternoon. So, okay, so just a few words about image fusion because sponge happening is kind of part of that. So according to Paul and one gender, image fusion aims at integration of disparate and complementary data to enhance the information apparent in the images as well as increasing the reliability of the interpretation. And image fusion is applied in many areas and it's applied in order to shop and images, improve geometric corrections, provide stereo viewing capabilities, replace defective data, substitute missing information, enhance certain features, complement datasets for improved specifications and also there are also many more. And detailed reviews can be found in the articles by Paul and one gender from 1998 and the newest one is the one written by Smith and Heather from 2005. So background of the work is that by using spectral imaging we can acquire a lot of data and which is of course very great, we have nice amount of details but sometimes it's also a little bit nasty since if you want very detailed data we also have to use so much storage space and also acquiring the image may take a very long time. So it would be kind of convenient if you could just use short time acquiring and maybe then to do some very nice tricks afterwards and end up having a nice picture afterwards. And in remote sensing, punch opening is often used in order to increase the spatial resolution of spectral images. So the question is could we or how could we apply this punch opening also in spectral color images? So the idea of punch opening is that one has high resolution non-chromatic image and when I say high resolution I just need the spatial resolution from now on and then low resolution spectral image and there are different ways of combining or using this and as a result once you get spectral image of higher resolution. There are many ways of doing the fusion but the problem is that they isn't such thing as ideal fusion method and all the fused images can be kind of considered as trade-offs between good geometrical representation and then the original so-called right colors. And different kind of fusion method has of course advantages and disadvantages and the one we're using is the one which has lately given quite promising results. But in a nutshell, the work is like trying to examine the possibility to enhance the spatial resolution of spectral color images by using RGB color images and using Nuance FX spectral imaging system to acquire these images. We are having both RGB images and spectral images at two different resolution levels and this spectral imaging system allows one to use just the very same geometry. And of course the goal of the punch opening and basic image fusion is just to have an image which would be as close as possible to that image which would be really acquired in a real case. So we are just estimating the results by comparing them to really acquired images. So, J.M. Ray, which is multi resolution analysis based in the model lesson introduced by Wang et al. in 2008. And it's a set designed to fuse high resolution panchromatic image with a low resolution spectral image. And the basis of assumption of the method is written there. So it kind of assumes that if we have both high and low resolution panchromatic images and also high and low resolution spectral images, they are kind of, or they correspond to each other, the lesson is like that. And from that we can just solve this high resolution spectral image. Of course there's a problem like what about if this low resolution panchromatic image is zero. So in order to avoid very problematic situation, one can just write the equation such that one gets high resolution image from the, I guess he or she adds something, this alpha omega, this low resolution spectral image. And omega is defined as a difference between high and low resolution panchromatic images. But how about since we are using RGB images and I'm just talking about panchromatic images, so what can we really do? Well the very easy solution is just take an average of all these three channels, RTMB, and use that image as a panchromatic image. Well then we can just try to employ these three channels we have. Either such that we just use one of these images, like for example if you have wavelength channel, let's say 630, we just use red channel as a panchromatic image. Or then something that is a little bit more complicated, just try to wait these RTB channels and try to employ all of them at the same time. It would be nice if we would have had a chance to just use camera responses and sensitivity curves, however that wasn't possible, so kind of ended up using the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. Then we have scaling factors. They are meant to compensate the differences in spectra which are acquired at different resolution levels. I mean for example if I just use the very best resolution and then change it to a lower one, one can see that there is really some very drastic differences in the level of spectra which of course is not the wanted effect. So having two different scaling factors, the first one just tries to in a way compensate the difference which is calculated from the panchromatic images and the other one just divides the high resolution image with the lower resolution image. Then about the experiments. So we have two objects which were acquired this spectral imaging system and we actually acquired four different kind of images. So both these RTP images and spectral images at low and high resolution. And the wavelength range used was from 420 to 720 at the time, 20 nautical miles. But the first two channels there were so noisy, there were some other problems as well so we just had to take this 460 nautical miles wavelength channel as the first one. So as I said before there were some differences between the spectra and the other one. So we have two different levels of resolution. And here is the first table, there will be many more. I'm sorry for that. But basically the differences between the spectra of different resolution levels, the average one was something like 1.5 to 2.1. So one has to take into account when just trying to judge the results. So then we just performed calculations and got some results, nasty tables. There are actually two different cases. It says calculated low resolution image. And that basically means that when we had this high resolution panchromatic image, we just changed its resolution to the lower one by taking two terms to windows and calculating the average of that. So that would actually be the real case how one could do it. The lower one is acquired low resolution image. It released as the one we acquired. But that was just done in order to somehow compare what is the difference between the calculated and the real case. In most cases I cannot really think that one would still like to also acquire this low resolution panchromatic image. But what we can see is that this maximum errors, when talking about color differences, it's always this delta E star AB. But there's actually no such a huge difference between this calculated and acquired low resolution image in this case when we are just using grayscale images. The only big difference you can see is that scaling lowers this maximum error. So this method, SGRO, is that no scaling is used on this S1, S2, other different scaling systems. So when we just moved into used RTP images, what happened was that this method SGRO and S1, they have lower values. But also now we can see some kind of difference between these calculated and acquired images used. And again, when using this M2, the color differences just becomes lower once. But otherwise they are not so drastic changes. Like when you compare the previous one and this one, in a way the correspondence between calculated and acquired ones, it kind of remains the same. In the case of the second image, well, the results are pretty much the same. And I think I'll just go then, extremely briefly, because they are really the same. So actually this color difference is not the only one which has some kind of effect, because there's also a thing called RM's error, which maybe tells a little bit more about the spectral shape. These results are actually quite nicely correlated to these previous color differences. And also in the case of the other image, food. These scalings used, they never really seem to have that huge, great, perfect impact. Maybe different kind of scalings could be used based on maybe different kind of systems. But then when comparing these two methods meant for using RTP images. So this second method in which these sensitivity functions were used, they seem to work better. And I kind of assume that when one would really be able to use sensitivity functions of camera, which should be better. Here are the perceived color differences in pictorial form. They have been scaled in a way that they used the whole grayscale. So you cannot really compare results from grayscale to M1 or M2 directly. But what you can see is that in the case of grayscale, one can see very clearly these white lines there. In the places where the color changes drastically from, for example, black to red or black to blue. And in the cases of M1 and M2, when all the RTP channels are employed are used, one cannot really see them anymore or at least not that much. So, good discussion. Well, the compared trailer pixels in both high and low resolution images may be identical, but the corresponding RTP triplets may not be alike. That's one case which might cause some gray here. And also, even though the differences in RTP triplets could be seen in grayscale images, the information transferred to alpha, which is like a relation coefficient, includes only the information about the difference in lightness and not in color. And this is emphasized in the border area of the colors. So actually, in the previous picture, it was seen very clearly. And the use of three different channels allows the handling of color information and different parts of the spectrum. So it kind of should help. Then conclusions. So M3 method is time efficient. It's actually very fast and rather easy to implement. It does have some shortcomings, but I would say that it preserves the spectral properties quite well. Since we have to remember that in the case of acquired spectra, they were already at the beginning differences. And of course, the use of these camera sensitivities should be help, should be, well, kind of recommended and should also help. Then always have acknowledgments. I would like to thank Alfred Kolder and Foundation for their funding. Fellow group of University of Eastern Finland for providing that guidance. And Dr. Vladimir Porco for kindly posting me towards Mitch Fuson. And thank you for your attention. So thank you, Ole. Time for just one, two questions. I hope you don't think this question is unfair, and it may be to do with the use of M-Rame. But somewhere in there, there must be an assumption about how rapidly you think the spectra are changing with wavelength. So in particular, if you have high reflectances at very short wavelengths, say 400 nanometers and maybe 4, 10 nanometers, but nothing happening at medium to long wavelengths, there'll be a real problem in improving those images at short wavelengths. Is that right? Can you still repeat it? I wasn't really able to hear what you said at the beginning. It's essentially the question of what assumptions this sharpening process makes about the rate of change of spectra that you're trying to model. Yeah, I assume that the main problem is when you have real powder, so then it usually means trouble. If you have very smooth changes, for example from yellow to red, it should be quite okay. Yeah, okay. That's kind of reassuring. Thank you. Any other questions? So thanks, but you have another one, so she will act as our keynote for this session, so please.
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This work examines the spectrum preserving properties of a multi-resolution analysisbased intensity modulation (MRAIM) when used for increasing the spatial resolution of spectral color images. The MRAIM algorithm is originally designed to fuse high-resolution panchromatic images with low-resolution spectral images in order to get high-resolution spectral images for remote sensing applications. Instead of panchromatic images, for which the MRAIM algorithm has originally been designed for, the MRAIM algorithm is implemented to use information from both grayscale and RGB color images. In order to utilize the information of the three channels included in RGB images, two different models are derived and examined. In addition, two kind of scaling factors are used for compensating possible differences between the images acquired at different resolution levels. The resulting high resolution spectral images are compared to the real acquired high resolution spectral images with respect to both maximum and average RMS errors and ΔE*ab color differences under CIE illuminants D65, A, F8 and F11. The used images are acquired by NuanceFX spectral imaging system, which allows the measuring of both spectral and RGB images at different resolution levels at identical geometry.
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10.5446/18268 (DOI)
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Thank you for your introduction. Let me talk about background and purposes of the present study. Recovery of spectral reflectances of objects being imaged through the use of image data is very important to reproduce color images under various illuminations. Although, we know estimation is usually used for the recovery, but the recovery performance of this estimation depends on the auto correlation matrix of the spectral reflectances and noise present in the image acquisition system. Is there a pointer? The spectral reflectance of some objects from the sensor responses can be recovered by applying VINN filter to sensor response P. The VINN filter is expressed by this equation, and RSS is the auto correlation matrix of the spectral reflectances of the imaged objects, and SL is a system matrix that contains the spectral sensitivities much prior to these illuminations. And here, REE represents the noise covariance matrix, and usually the noise covariance matrix is expressed by a simple formula. This represents noise variance, and I represent identity matrix. This graph shows the MSE as a function of the noise variance used for the estimation. This axis represents MSE. MSE is defined by this equation. Here, REE is actual reflectance, and R hat is a recovered spectral reflectance. And the scale of the Euclidean column is for all reflectances. As you can see from this graph, MSE is minimized at actual noise variance, so it is very important to find or estimate the actual noise variance. I have already proposed a model to estimate the noise variance of the imaged equation system and a method to recover the spectral reflectances without prior knowledge of the object. In the previous model, the noise was assumed independent, identically distributed random variables over each channel. However, noise variance of each channel is not always equal. This graph shows the concept of the noise variance estimation in the previous model. Let R be an actual spectral reflectance, and let R hat be a recovered spectral reflectance. The MSE of the recovered spectral reflectance is defined by this equation. Can we apply the V-net filter with zero noise variance to pixel value? Then, MSE at zero noise variance can be expressed by this equation. Here, square of the sigma represents actual noise variance of the imaged equation system. So, noise variance can be estimated by using this equation. Here, MSE zero can be obtained by experiment, and other factors can be computed if spectra sensitivity of the multispectral camera and spectral power distribution of the illumination and spectral reflectances of the training samples are previously known. By applying the estimated noise variance and spectral reflectances of the training samples to the filter, spectral reflectances of the test samples can be recovered without the prior knowledge of the test samples. The purposes of the presentation are to propose a new model for the estimation of the noise covariance matrix without the assumption that noise variance of each channel is equal in multispectral camera. And second is to show that the new proposal is very important for the analysis of multispectral imaged equation system. This slide shows the concepts of the noise covariance estimation by the new model. Let R be an actual spectral reflectance, and let R have the estimated noise variance reflectance. When the filter with zero noise covariance matrix is applied to sensor signals, then the auto correlation matrix of the difference between R and R hat, average for all reflectances, is expressed in this equation. The auto correlation matrix acts as zero noise covariance matrix is expressed by this equation from the mathematical analysis. And here REE represents the actual noise covariance matrix of the imaged equation system. So it is possible to estimate the noise covariance matrix by this equation. Here this term is factor can be obtained by experiment, and other factors can be calculated by using the spectral characteristics of the sensors, illuminations, and reflectances of the training sample. By using the estimated noise covariance matrix and spectral reflectances of training samples to the filter, spectral reflectances of the test samples can be recovered without the prior knowledge of the test samples. Experiments are performed with these conditions. This figure shows the spectral sensitivities used for the imaged acquisition, and this figure shows the spectral power distribution used for the illumination. This is a typical example of the estimated covariance matrix. This diagonal element is some kind of noise variance of each channel. This indicates the first channel's noise variance, and this indicates the second channel's noise variance. This is a typical example of the recovered spectral reflectances when the same samples are used for tests and training samples. The green mark represents actual spectral reflectance, and the red mark represents recovered spectral reflectance with estimated noise covariance matrix proposed in this presentation. This blue mark represents the recovered spectral reflectance by the previous model. This table shows the comparison of the recovery performance between previous and present models. The first and second row shows the experimental results when the same samples used for training and test samples. The third and fourth row shows the experimental results when test samples are different from training samples. This column shows the experimental results by the previous model, and this column shows the MSE by this new proposal. When the same sample used for training and test samples, recovery performance of the new model that is estimated by the noise covariance matrix is superior to the previous model. However, the recovery performance of this new model is inferior when the test samples are different from training samples. From the experimental result, it is concluded that the covariance matrix is estimated by the proposed, overfits the covariance matrix to the learning sample. Therefore, recovery performance is inferior to the previous model when the test samples are different from the training samples. However, this overfitting means that the estimates of the covariance matrix are correctly performed using the proposed model. Since in this proposal, the noise covariance matrix can be estimated, so it is possible to evaluate the value of the diagonal element as a function of the average signal power in each channel. From this experimental result, it may be said that the value of the diagonal element is equivalent to the noise variance of each channel. It is independent of the average signal power in each channel. This graph shows the trace of the estimated noise covariance matrix divided by the channel number, which is equivalent to the average noise variance for all channels as a function of the sampling intervals. The result is the average signal power in each channel, which is equivalent to the average signal power in each channel. From this experiment, the noise variance increases with decrease in the bit depth below the 8-bit depth. As you can see, it is difficult to distinguish between the 10-bit and 8-bit, but this value slightly increases when the depth decreases from 10-bit to 8-bit. The sampling interval dependence is like this. And the mean noise variance increases with increase in the sampling number longer than 20 nanometers. In conclusion, a new model is proposed for the estimation of the covariance matrix of the system noise of color image acquisition. The system noise is largely uncorrelated with pixel value, and it is not identically distributed in each channel. Since covariance matrix estimated by the proposal overfits the matrix to learning samples, the recovery performance for the test sample is poor compared with the previous model, when test samples are different from learning samples. However, this overfitting means that estimates of the covariance matrix are correctly performed using the proposed model. The proposal is very important for noise analysis of an image acquisition system. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your presentation. I presume that you use linear relationships for obtaining your sensor response output in terms of the luminance, reflectances, and sensor sensitivities. So you fix the exposure time. Have you tried what happens with your model if you change the exposure time? It is independent on the integration time of the CCD. We use the exposure value in the linear portion of the data. If the over the linear region is used, we collect it to linear by using the lookup table. If the intensity of light is bent on CCD, it increases the nonlinear region of the CCD. At that time, we use the correct nonlinearity to linear relations.
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Prior knowledge of the noise present in a color acquisition device is very important for the recovery of spectral reflectance of an object being imaged, since recovery performance is greatly influenced by the noise. In the previous paper (IEEE Trans. Image Process. 1848 (2006), the author proposed a new model to estimate noise variance of an image acquisition system by assuming the noise variance in each channel is equal and showed this model is very useful to accurately recover a reflectance of an imaged object. This paper describes extended model for the estimation of the covariance matrix the noise present in an image acquisition system without assumption. It is demonstrated that the proposal overfits noise covariance matrix to learning samples and that recovery performance for the test samples is poor with the previous model. However this overfitting means the estimates are correctly performed using the model. The new model is effective in analyzing the present in an image acquisition system.
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10.5446/18271 (DOI)
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Α ngh, ρ tö styles είναι μια ιστορία της οργibilidad. Ας τα μέτια του πράγμαам θα δείξουμε άλλες πληξεμεριντικές στpers & φτωχεδοποιείες της εταιρικής διαχειροκρότευσης callsour &θερσίου γιατί Frühσ chilly Russell Croomön roreal & χρονолодιоз... εμείς είναι η ωτηνή σε την θήρά Φυσικά, για τα τελευταία 40 χρόνια, η δημιουργία της κόλλωσης και της κολλωκαρδικορυσίας έχει been on whether the color categories are formed under the influence of the panhuman shared perceptual mechanisms or whether language influences thought and perceptual processes. However, recent developments in linguistics and psychology have allowed some degree of compromise in which both sides have recognized the influence of language at least to some extent to the structure of the color categories. This image provides a neuromate support from fMRI scans that were performed while the observers were performing color naming tasks. You can see that the area of the brain that is responsible for the language of the left cerebral is directly taking part in the decision making. Our research was not interested in giving an answer at the origin of the color categories. Instead, it was concerned about the mapping of color stimuli to multilingual sets of color names in white cultural use. Our research started from the argument of John Cage, an art historian from the University of Cambridge, that he argued in his Color and Culture book in 1995 that the color space has never been more crudely mapped by color language in the history of art. So what we want to see is what is further the 11 basic categories. We decided to use the World Wide Web because it offers extended toolkit to access easily a large number of observers from culturally and diverse populations. However, because of the absence of observer monitoring, its offense evolves higher observer metameter, higher rates of dropouts. Studies conducted over the web offer greater external validity through greater technical and viewing conditions variants. This is achieved by replacing the control systematic error with random distributed error. We designed and developed a color naming experiment in Flash ES4 and ActionSimp3 that supports basic RGB color management. The Flash Up was embedded in HTML and connected via PSB bridges to a MySQL database. We can either perform direct analysis, statistical analysis on the server or connect it to MATLAB. The communication form was independent from the database in order to guarantee the anonymity of the observers. The Cerebellum procedure consisted of six stages. We built it on the top of previous mistakes from Nathan Moroni, actually, in collaboration with Nathan. We wanted to see how we can collect a much bigger number of data. In the first stage we followed the high barrier technique of doesDescribe by rapes. We made the life of our observers a bit difficult by asking them to adjust the properties of their displays to their RGB standards. In the second stage we asked them to provide information about their monitors, the manufacturer of the monitor, the type, the distance from the monitor. Also we asked them to describe with verbal descriptions the surround, the lighting conditions. Finally, the state of calibration of the monitor. At the third stage we screened our observers for possible color deficiency by using a simplified web color vision test developed at the City University of London by Professor John Berber. In the fourth step we used distributed psychophysics to present a small number of samples to a large number of observers. We presented 20 color patches to each observer, one at each time. A few samples were repeated in order to measure the consistency of the responses. Also we informed the participants that the response time will be counted for each color name. At the fifth stage we wanted to see if there is any influence of the language and culture in the structure of the color categories. We gathered information about the place that they grow up, about the country that they are currently living, about educational and language levels, and also age and gender. At the last stage we just presented a summary of the responses and we offered a communication form for valuable comments and feedback. In total we used 600 test samples. The samples were selected from the monthly notation data that the original data set consist of 2729 samples defined against neutral gray background and under illuminancy. We used the Bradford chromatic adaptation transform to bring the color samples, the stimulus values to be viewed under D65. Then we clipped all the samples that were out of this RGB gamut in order to avoid over representation of the RGB extremes. Because of the cylindrical shape of the monthly solid we followed the advices of Bill Meyer to Starrkes and Whitfield to equalize the perceptual distances between the samples. Currently the database hosts more than 20,000 color names from 1400 observers. It is translated in five languages. The most popular language is English that we will analyze today. Greek, Spanish, German and Catalan have been released just three weeks ago. Today we will see the most interesting months of the experiment, the first three ones of the months of the experiment. The STML page was viewed 3,320 times, almost less than half of the observers of the visitors decided to start the experiment. Only the 51% completed the experiment and kind of confirmed the high rates of dropouts in web-based experiments. In the English data set 10% identified multiple responses via the IP address. The 10% were in English people that performed the experiment more than once, actually twice. If they were more than twice they were rejected and all the responses were included. 5% of the observers included disruptive responses that mainly involved incomplete and numerical responses or using languages other than the one of the experiment. The color-deficience test, the color-vision test, kind of I indicate that there is a possible color-deficience for 17% of the observers. All the participants were informed to visit the Rhofthalmologist to identify if there is, to diagnose the color deficiency. This result, following the literature review, is kind of as coherent with previous studies that the SODA also in the first screening test of the ICHARA, there is kind of a big 18% to 20% of the observers that they have found that they have a color deficiency, but then kind of after closer examination we can find that this actually the average percent is about 8%. One response was rejected because it was from a person that was younger than 16 years old and all the rest of the data were normal. What we found when we kind of counted the color words of the responses, we found that 52% involved monolexical color terms, 42% used two word description including modifier and 6% included three words or more description. It was quite interesting that only 29% of the observers involved of the observations involved the basic color terms. So we'll have to throw away the 71% of our data if we like to focus our research only on the consensual color categories. So the most popular color name was purple followed by pink, blue and green. This was for a bit of surprise at the beginning, but it is produced by the shape of the S&JP gamut that is very rich in the purple area while it's very artificially poor at the Sian. Also it's quite interesting to see that in the first 10 top list color terms included names like Tirkwa and Ilak, while the red is in the 14th position. The response time, kind of here we can see actually the importance of the basic color terms that almost all of them were identified faster than all the other color names. The only secondary color term that was the first 11 top listed was Teal. An interesting finding was that flesh and tan and the kind of pits were kind of found the Tom-20 to describe the region between the yellow, the orange and the pink. They were kind of very sensitive to identify the color of the face. The consistency is a measurement of agreement of two responses of the same observer for the same sample. There is a kind of guarantee that there will be at least 15 samples in between, so we will kind of empty the kind of temporary memory of the subject before we will ask to repeat the response. We followed the same methodology as Guest and Lar that kind of included two measurements. The first one kind of we compared the entire color name including all the number of words and we found that it was kind of low consistency, kind of confirm that three color name task that have kind of poor repeatability. However, the responses were not random. When we kind of measured the main hue component of the color name, we found that 66.6% that it's kind of, if it's relatively well to the reported values of Stargess and Whitfield and Boynton and also that it was 78 and 81%. While in their experiment they used the constraint, the research, the responses to monolexical terms and also the subjects knew about repeated samples. In order to validate our experimental methodology, we compared our results with the Psycho-oficial-Cell-Rigori experiments of Boynton and also and the Stargess and Whitfield. The color difference that we found between our results and Stargess, it was 14.1 that is almost equal to the in-between comparison. The bigger difference with Boynton and also can be explained by the different sampling and the different illumination that they were using in their experiment. When we compared our results with Nathan Moroni that included the topmost frequent chromatic color terms, we found that we have a linear fit of 0.9951. That means that even that color names that include secondary or multiple word color descriptions, maybe they are not kind of repeatable but when they are used they are used to describe specific regions of the color space. We found that this study confirmed the importance of the basic color terms because they were used more consistently and identified faster than not basic color names. However, the majority of our responses evolved secondary color names and modifiers. The validation of our experiment produced very good agreement, satisfactory agreement with previous studies that have been conducted in controlled viewing conditions. It is smaller than a recent publication from Ben Avente that he did his experiment in controlled viewing conditions. The result that we found for the 27 color terms kind of 3D case that maybe we can extend the color vocabulary for more advanced users. Future directions kind of evolved the investigation of the influence of the viewing conditions and the language on the location and the distribution of the color names. Our primary aim is to develop a color naming model to automate the color name task in a web-based environment to facilitate color communication within and between different cultures. Thank you for your time and I would like to thank the Color Group of Great Britain for helping me towards the expenses of this presentation. Time for one extremely short question. But I didn't really understand the question. Can you simplify this? Maybe we can elucidate during the overlaunch.
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An online colour-naming experiment was designed and developed to determine a broad set of colour words in wide cultural use with their corresponding colour ranges in sRGB and Munsell specifications. The quality of the English dataset was analysed in terms of colour centroids, frequency of names, consistency and response time. The importance of basic colour terms was confirmed while it was also revealed that in free colour naming tasks, the majority of the observers preferred to use non-basic colour terms. The validation of the web-based experimental methodology with previous studies conducted in controlled viewing conditions produced satisfactory results, while a comparison of the 27 most frequent chromatic colour words with a previous web-based experiment showed a remarkable agreement.
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10.5446/18272 (DOI)
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Merci Mr Charman, bonsoir à tous. Je vous présente ma maître Thésys et la directée de Raphaël Laberade. Tout d'abord, je vous introduirai le contexte et la motivation de cet étudiant. Ensuite, je présenterai les opérateurs de maître de maître comparé à cet étudiant. Dans la partie de la source, je vais expliquer en détail le design expérimental et les deux expériments qui sont poursuivus. Pour ce travail, je conclure. En interdiction, pourquoi une image dynamique? A la gauche, vous pouvez voir des photographes dynamiques. C'est à dire que chaque pixel peut prendre 256 valeurs différentes pour chaque couleur, rouge, gris et bleu. Vous pouvez voir que cette photo est overexpose par rapport à ce que l'on peut observer dans la réalité. En effet, avec une image dynamique, chaque pixel peut prendre plus de valeurs différentes, en ce tableau. Nous pouvons donc avoir plus d'informations sur la luminance de la scène et la photo est plus proche de la réalité. Un autre point sur le contexte de cet étudiant est que nous essayons maintenant de réduire la conception et de trouver une solution de l'énergie de l'éthique. Mais en gardant le confort de l'occupateur et en afin de identifier la préférence des gens, les tests psychophysiques sont carried out. Pour éviter les tests en réel monde, nous pouvons performer ce test psychophysique dans le environnement virtuel. Mais nous devons assurer que la solution préférée dans le environnement virtuel est aussi préférée dans le réel monde. Dans notre laboratoire, une similité de réalité virtuelle est employée. C'est un délai dynamique. Le délai dynamique est plus loyer que l'image de l'image à être déplaie. En orderant de délai être déplaie, nous devons photographiser les images de synthétisme qui sont compétues avec des programmes de simulation de l'image à être délai dynamique. En orderant de délai dynamique à être déplaie, nous devons délai délai dynamique à être déplaie. Le délai dynamique doit être compréhendé avec un opérateur de tournevapeur. Le opérateur de tournevapeur compresse le délai dynamique pour présenter l'image qui essaie de reproduire le capteur de la scène facebouillée. Mais beaucoup de opérateurs de tournevapeur sont disponibles. La motivation de ce studio est la sélection du opérateur de tournevapeur le plus souhaitable pour obtenir une image qui représente la réalité facebouillée. Pour cela, les tests psychophysiologiques sont carrés à l'extérieur. Dans ce studio, nous voulons comparer les résultats obtenus avec trois différents protocoles expérimentaux, et surtout les résultats obtenus dans le virtual environnement et dans le réel monde. Je vous montre que les six opérateurs de tournevapeur sont choisis pour comparer ces deux studios. C'est Durant, Fatale, Renard 2004 et Drago. Durant, Fatale, Renard 2004 et Drago sont des opérateurs global. Ils travaillent uniformement sur l'image. Le test appartient à l'aide d'une photo de tous les pixels. Durant, Fatale, Renard, Renard, H.Kimin sont des opérateurs locales. Ils adaptent la action pour chaque pixel et le rendent en compte. Pour sélectionner le plus adaptable opérateur de tournevapeur, nous avons mis deux expériments avec trois différents protocoles expérimentaux, multi-stimuliers de rate et multi-stimuliers de rank pour le premier expériment, et monostimuliers de rate pour le deuxième expériment. Nous utilisons cinq différents scènes, trois d'entre eux sont liés par l'artificial et deux d'entre eux avec la délite. Finalement, six images de tournevapeurs différents sont jugées pour chaque scène. Nous avons donc les images de tournevapeurs. Nous photographons les scènes avec différents sets, par variablement la temps de l'exposé et l'opérature. Nous pouvons donc avoir un groupe de photographes d'entre eux, entre eux, et d'entre eux. Et après, nous utilisons un software de range dynamique pour obtenir l'image de la photo de groupes de photographes. Finalement, chaque opérateur de tournevapeurs est appliqué sur l'image de la photo de tournevapeurs, pour obtenir les images de six différents. Comme vous pouvez le voir ici, le juge du classement, durant le test, durant le Rénaud 4 Drago, Fatale H. Kimmé et Rénaud 2, le basse-roum, le corridor, le basse-roum avec les blindes ouvertes, donc ce rume est seulement lié à la délite. Et le même rume avec les blindes fermées, seulement lié à la délite. Maintenant, je vais expliquer les deux expériments qui ont été connectés et les résultats obtenus. Le premier expériment était dividé dans deux étapes. Les premiers gens étaient devant le Rénaud et ont dû comparer les images printées aux images de la photo de Rénaud, avec un protocole multistimulé. Ensuite, ils étaient confrontés à l'imgé et observaient la même image de l'image de Rénaud, et ont dû juger avec un protocole multistimulé. Donc je vais expliquer. Le premier, ils étaient devant le Rénaud et ont dû mettre les images printées sur un escalier, de la photo de Rénaud, et en répondant à la question que l'image représente le Rénaud. Après cela, ils ont dû exprimer le commentaire spontané en défaite de l'image de l'image de Rénaud. Après cela, devant le dispositif de display, ils ont dû identifier des souvenirs de la scène de la réelle. La image de la photo de Rénaud réelle les images de réelle et les listes de la liste 1. Donc ils peuvent observer les images de Rénaud. Pour les résultats, maintenant, nous computons l'avantage et la déviation standard. Comme vous pouvez le voir, Drago et Rénaud 2 obtiennent l'avantage. Donc les scores d'avantage sont sur un escalier de 0 à 107. Après, nous employons le test de Chris Calowall et les tests de comparaison de multiples avantage. Les 4 groupes apparaissent. Group A représente les opérateurs de maitre de maitre de maitre et la liste 1 de la liste. Alors Drago et le test résultat indiquent que, dans tout le monde, la image de maitre de Drago et Rénaud 2 est perceptuelle de la clé à la référence réelle avec respect à l'opérateur de maitre de maitre de maitre. Pour le test de seconde, nous compute le ratio des nombreuses fois que la image de maitre de maitre de maitre de maitre de maitre de maitre est choisie comme la plus similaire de la réalité, avec un nombre total d'observations. Vous pouvez voir que les deux groupes apparaissent et Drago et Rénaud 2 et Duran ont le meilleur résultat avec le ratio de plus que 88%. Nous employons aussi les tests de comparaison de multiples avantage et ils sont au meilleur niveau A. En même temps, regardez le nombre d'observations. Vous pouvez voir que Rénaud 2 et H. Kimmé ont un nombre grand de observations, donc les résultats obtenus pour les deux sont les plus liés. Alors, sur les défaits, les commentaires, plusieurs catégories de défaits ont été identifiées. Le nombre de commentaires pour chaque catégorie est donné à cette table. Comme vous pouvez le voir, les maitres de la image et les couleurs inappropriées sont les plus citées. Les couleurs sont inappropriées quand les participants jugent les couleurs trop fortes ou pas fortes, mais aussi trop brillantes, trop hautes ou, au contraire, trop drogues. Les commentaires étaient liés à différents features de la image. Les participants sont reliés à l'ensemble global pour l'ensemble et à l'intérieur de la scène des défaits de couleur, liés à des couleurs légales et aux couleurs objets. Je vais expliquer en détail le second expériment. Dans le second expériment, 50 % ont été partagés, et 42 % ont été partagés dans le premier. En ce moment, ils étaient aussi en front de la scène de la scène de la scène de la scène, mais ils jugent chaque image un après un autre et ils ont dû juger chaque image sur une scale de 1 à 10, en répondant aux questions que la scène représente. Les résultats sont fermés, nous avons employé la même analyse statistique, et vous pouvez voir que Drago et Renard ne sont pas les meilleures places A. Après cela, nous voulons comparer les résultats obtains avec les trois différents protocoles expérimentaux. Pour cela, nous avons employé le test de Criscal. Alors l'un de nous freshmenrocketons est avoir comparé la Landesregierung face à gaatto et aux Hub Bottom. En l'expo de la table grise Priscale′s impro итог′s par la目bo Madame la 차quette, vous avez це seen qu'il n'y avait pas de lapse statistique entre transfertenance紀nique de даim rose à nonprofits et octopusier in essaie des environnement. de la maîtrisise de maîtrisise ne dépendent pas de la technique de reproduction, soit de la image printée ou de la maîtrisise. Après cela, nous comparons les résultats obtenus avec les deux protocoles de la maîtrisise. Si vous regardez le graphement avarage, vous pouvez voir que l'avarage est plus haut pour le second test, mais l'operaise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise est très clou pour les deux tests. Nous avons aussi employé le test de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise, et nous avons trouvé qu'il n'y avait aucun difference significative entre les marques obtenues par ma maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de Rainer 2 pour la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise et seulement pour le corridor de Drago. En conclut, nous avons mis 2 expériments et 3 différents protocoles expérimentales. Ils sont en descrédition dans ce tableau pour choisir le plus suitable opérateur de maîtrisise de la maîtrisise. Comme vous pouvez le voir, les méthodes d'évaluation et le processus de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise étaient différents, mais les opérateurs préférés sont les mêmes, Drago et Rainer 2. En fait, Drago et Rainer 2 sont préférés. Les images de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise de Drago et Rainer 2 sont perceptibles, les plus clés aux réalités. Les 5 tests testés dans cet étudiant et en respect de les autres opérateurs de la maîtrisise de la maîtrisise comparé à cette étude. Et cet résultat est obtenu avec trois différents protocoles expérimentaux. En plus, à l'experimentation des protocoles expérimentaux, l'utilisation d'une ligne de rondeur est la même. Et les résultats obtenus avec deux différentes techniques de reproduction ont fait de la fin de la fin sur le préféré de l'opérateur de tournage. Donc, dans cet travail, nous sommes en train de voir qu'il n'y a pas de dépendance sur la technique de reproduction. Mais, ce travail est lié à la caméra employée et à la position et la calibration mais aussi à tout le printement, tout le délai de la display. Et nos résultats sont spécifiques à la tondeur 5C. Et finalement, selon les commentaires, selon les commentaires, les défaits qui sont les images de l'art, les présences de les couleurs inappropriées. Donc, dans le travail, peut-être, pour improving l'image de la tondeur, cela explique les paramètres des opérateurs de la tondeur. Et, selon nos résultats, les tests psychophysicistes qui sont liés à l'un des fields et la préférence de la configuration peuvent être adressés par la display de l'émulator après une calibration aquarelle. Mais, la suitabilité de l'émulator pour l'application couleur est plus importante. Et plus d'investigation sur cela est nécessaire. Merci pour votre attention. Merci beaucoup. Je pose une question. Vous avez les 5 scenes et puis, selon les différents algorithmes, vous avez les images de la tondeur. Comment vous assurez qu'il n'y a pas de bug ou de déviation de ce que l'autor a fait lui-même? Comment vous assurez que c'est vraiment un algorithme d'autor et que le programmeur n'a pas fait quelque chose qui pourrait modifier, par exemple, l'église d'une image. Le programme, vous êtes un opérateur? Parce que de l' seats sur la map d'une tonte Nous employons une image de très sondage et oftentimes de très monuments du danger Enterrant l'ement de laquinho dans la tondeur avec range tant accessible d'identité, Je l'ai employé déjà, c'est l'algorithme. Ok, donc vous avez employé la code de l'autor pour faire ça. Sorry? Vous avez employé la code de l'autor pour créer ce loomap. Ok. D'autres questions? Je crois que vous n'avez pas fait vos expériments ici en Finlande. Les conditions de l'autor et les conditions de l'autor peuvent changer. Comment vous interpriez les résultats que vous avez pour cette scène où vous voyez l'au-delà? Je pense que les rankings sont stabiles, mais je pense que l'autor n'a pas été stabil. En fait, pour l'autor, je crée une image différente. En fait, pour un jour, je reste dans le loom et je vois quelles mesures je peux prendre. Si les gens viennent en matin, je dois avoir une image de l'amour. Si les gens viennent en matin, au début de l'amour, ils jugent les groupes de photograph. Je fais des groupes différents pour les prendre en compte. Ok, question. Comment vous interpriez les conditions de l'autor? Vous avez dit que les conditions de l'autor sont stabiles, mais les conditions de l'autor sont stabiles. Vous avez dit que les conditions de l'autor sont stabiles, mais ce n'est pas clair. Si vous étiez en train de croire que les conditions de l'autor sont stabiles ou non, ce n'est pas clair. Vous étiez en train de croire que les conditions de l'autor sont stabiles ou non. Je ne comprends pas la dernière partie de la question. Quand les gens parlent de range de la haute dynamique, certains de nous, les vieux timers, avec des hauts gris, transmettent cela à l'aérosse contraste. Le ratio de l'aluminance du noir de l'aluminium est le plus bright du noir. Mais si la ratio de l'aluminium est dominée, ce que vous appelez est le ratio de l'aluminium et l'aluminium. Je n'ai pas fait ce que je voulais. Je me demande aux gens de l'expresser les défis des images, pour avoir des informations sur les attributs importants sur l'image de la tonnette et de la juge des gens. Merci. D'autres questions? Si il n'y a pas d'autres questions, je voudrais vous demander si les autres speakers sont ici. Si quelqu'un de la prochaine groupe de speakers, je vous remercie.
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To identify people’s preference, psychovisual tests are carried out in virtual environment. Images of scenes used for psychovisual tests are natively High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. However, in order to allow a Low Dynamic Range (LDR) display device to project HDR pictures, their dynamic range must be compressed with a tone-mapping operator (TMO). Thus, before tests are carried out, selection of the most suitable TMO, perceptually speaking, is required to present images faithfully, depending on the aim of the application. In this paper, three different experimental protocols are proposed for assessing the applications of a display device used for psychovisual tests and selecting the most suitable TMO from six candidates. An additional goal is to give a first idea of the applications that can be addressed by this device. Two subjective experiments were conducted and are presented in the paper. The first one is divided in two steps. The results of three different protocols (two protocols in the first test and the third in the second test) for the identification of the preferred TMO for five different scenes are compared and LDR image defects noticed by observers are highlighted in the paper.
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10.5446/18273 (DOI)
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The work I'm going to present today is not very technical because I'm not a technical person, I'm not good with mathematics and I beg your pardon. So what I've been trying to do is obtain a full HDR image from a single exposure, which might seem a little bit ill-posed as a problem and in fact it is, but we'll see that it can get some interesting things going on. So who am I? I don't have a very good answer. There are some just data I worked with with Professor Ritzi and a couple of other friends, some of the best minds I know, on random sprayer ray renecs and then following work. And now I'm studying under Professor Ha Yong-ho and Kyeong-puk National University in South Korea. I've been doing too many things just to let you know all of that. So why do we need high dynamic range imaging? Well you can obviously see this is a typical high dynamic range scene. There is a strong highlight from a window and more lighting inside so you cannot see what's going on here and the sky is completely burnt. There is no color at all. And this was obviously taken with the camera out exposure. So what HDR is all about is fusing a number of, a variable number of exposures of different shots into one single image that then gets tone mapped in order to be reproduced. Usually you would see false colors, for example, images in order to show what the image contents are. And I have one big question for all of you and I gave my own answer but it comes later. How much limited is really a low dynamic range image? How low is low dynamic range? This is quite a famous image that we have seen in many works. And well this is the result from random sprayer red in X and like here it's not actually very clear on the projector but the original image has like two bits of information in these areas and in these areas and we are able to extract a lot of color information out of it. So this got me thinking, can we do something similar with HDR imaging? The idea is that raw image files from cameras are the key to producing this kind of effect. And as we all know, raw image files are taken ideally right after the quantization. So there is no further post processing while the standard output like T4JPAC images go through all the chain, they go through what balance noise removal, color compression and then image compression. So what are raw files? Are they high dynamic range images? Are they low dynamic range images? Well at least in theory if the compression curves, the tone compression curves that the camera uses are well thought, the dynamic range should be the same. What changes is the quantization. So we can have 10, 12, 14 bit quantization instead of 8 bits per pixel. And also the data is unprocessed as we said already. And is this really more informative than just the, you know, the teeth output of the camera? I believe it does, there is. And there is like, there is more than meets the eye. There is more data in the dark areas of, in the lowly exposed areas of an HDR image than we actually think there is. Sometimes, and this is also because most of the imaging sensors tend to saturate very quickly in the bright areas, but I have a fairly big amount of dynamic range in the low part of the dynamic spectrum. So my idea was, okay, let's try to get one raw image from the camera and let's try to estimate the other two images that we would, for example, use to produce HDR image. And, well, okay, I wonder why are, are you listening to me instead of going out and, no, it's beautiful outside. Okay. The implementation in fact was done with a neural network, multi-layer perceptron. The structure has been determined by brute force approach, so it gave some extremes to the, on the limited amount of samples and we got the network that best responded to the samples. And it exploits the channel's correlation in the Bayer color filter array, because usually the structure, the disposition of the electronics in the sensor is arranged by horizontal lines, so there is more correlation between photo sides adjacent on a line than on a column. So we take, in this example, we are taking the red color filter array pixel and taking the two neighboring green channels and the average of the red channel to give some attachment to the whole data set. And we get what the value of the pixel at two exposures on, in the chain, should be. Due to lack of time, the training set was extremely limited at just three HDR scenes, which were taken, obviously, in three different exposures. And we used 500,000 samples taken at random from the three scenes in order to perform the training. And the network has been, each of the channels in the Bayer filter array has its own network. And here we distinguish between green red and green blue channels as for the reason I said before, that green pixels on different lines have different correlations to the neighboring pixels. And we set as a target a 10 to the minus 4 mean squared error. In order to test our method, we obviously tried to verify by executing the method on the training set and on two images out of the training set. As I said, the estimation starts from the darkest of the exposures. So these are the three training scenes we used. They are again typical high dynamic range situations. And these are the two test scenes. Well, this is not really a very high dynamic range, you know, scene, but I wanted to be sure that the method could handle actually low dynamic range scenes as well. And this is different in the sense that the input levels of a lot of the image were much higher than the training set. So it would pose a problem to the neural network, to the train network. These are the result for this scene for the first estimation step. So from minus 2 respect to the automatic exposure value to the automatic exposure value. And as you can see, the average of the errors on the positive and negative axis are quite low. We are way below 2% roughly. And going to the next step, so estimating four stops away from the starting from the input image, we have still an acceptable average error of about plus 5 and minus 5%. A little bit more than that. The problem comes with this image. The first estimate is not bad, but the second estimate has huge error average, especially in the underestimation phase. So it's over 15% error. That's too much. We cannot accept it. So, and this is instead an example I've taken the best, sorry, maybe you want to see the other ones, but I've taken the best one. Of the tone mapping performed on the real data and on the estimated data. There is a slight color shift, for example, on the wall, but overall it's very, it's very, it's very good and there is good detail reproduction in the dark areas of the image. So how did we go to improve the estimation? Well, we performed some steps of the common image processing chain in order to obtain cleaner data on which to train the neural network. And these steps were white balancing, black level and separation level detection and limitation and denoising. So, by doing this, we were able to limit the error. As you can see, actually on the first estimate, the error is a little bit higher, but on the second estimate, while it was like here, it was at 15% in the underestimation part of the problem. Here is around 7%, 7.5%. So we halved the error of estimation. And also in both images, there is almost no over-estimation. That's because the values are clipped to the maximum possible values. So, and another interesting fact is that those parts of the image that are underestimated in one, two, three, four, interesting fact is that those parts of the image that are underestimated in one of the exposures are correctly estimated in the other one. So, while this is not perfect, it grants some sort of balancing to the HDR image formation algorithm which can choose the best shot according to the data presented. Obviously, this is a white car, so this is like a saturation point. It couldn't be much worse than this. And so, in conclusion, the numerical results are decent given the rather problematic, you know, problem that we tried to approach. And it's really the HDR image generation is kind of mixed back. I didn't show all of the images, mostly because there are some color balancing problems. The error is not equally distributed on the color filter channels, so white balancing doesn't work as it should. But on the training images, it works pretty well. And so, in the end, I would say that as it is, it's feasible but only really for a limited amount of cases which basically amount to the same images you used for training. But this gives some hints about the inherent data present in the HDR shots and in the, sorry, in the roll shots. And there is much more that we can exploit than is usually believed to. And, for example, this method could be used instead of, you know, getting just one shot and generating the full HDR image used to reduce the number of shots you need to obtain in HDR image from 3, 5, 7, to maybe 2 and use the neural networks to perform interpolation. So, this is it. And, like all Korean students, I hope you have no questions. We do have a few minutes for questions, so I hope there are some. Yes. Thank you for the presentation. You said at the beginning it may be an ill post problem that you are working at. So, I think you are a little bit right. You are fighting against noise and quantization errors that hide the information that you want to estimate. So, at least you could use, for example, to evaluate the errors, some kind of measure which focuses on those artifacts which may be specifically there like quantization and noise. Yes. Instead of an overall quality measure. That is something we should do. We didn't really have the time. It is in the project to take into account better error measure. And actually, if you look at the full paper, the reference I gave for denoising. It's actually an extremely clever approach that takes into account aspects of the imaging pipeline like photo shot noise and quantization noise. So, part of it is, we hope, solved by the denoising step that we introduced later in the work. In some on the shelves software like digital light room, for example, there is this possibility to have like one aperture less or more. So, did you compare, because this would be already your program, I mean, there is the computation in your computational network. Yes. So, actually, what happens in most programs you can use for photo retouching or raw image file processing is that the range available in the raw image file is compressed in a different way. So, when you treat the slider on those programs, you are like shifting up and down the range that gets compressed into a low dynamic range image. Here we, in the beginning, I tried to explain that we have taken into account full HDR images generated from three shots, not just from a single one. So, we are comparing to a real HDR image. So, maybe I was not clear enough. In some software like digital light room, you have your original image and you can have some tool which asks to have your original image with one or two difference in exposition. So, I thought this is exactly what you are doing with your, why, where is the difference then? The difference is that as far as I know, and I may be misinformed, those programs do not attempt to reconstruct the missing data. I understood this, but maybe you can use these to reconstruct after this was the point. The idea is exactly that one. Yes. I also had a similar question or suggestion that there seems to be something, just very simple thing you could do which clearly is not as sophisticated as what you are doing, but it would be interesting to see how it compares. What if we just give this stretched low dynamic range to be a high dynamic range? How big difference does it make from what you are doing? Just to have a comparison of what you are doing. I will definitely take it to account. I think we will stop there with the questions. Thank you.
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HDR image formation and display has been an argument of extreme interest even when digital cameras were not yet consumer products. While recent research in both fields has seen very interesting works, none is really revolutionary, since what goes on behind the scene has been left basically unchanged. In the image formation field in particular, a lot of energy has been spent so to solve the problems that arise when taking multiple exposures: illumination change, camera shake and in-scene movement. In this paper we approach HDR image formation from a different perspective, which tries to solve in one move all the mentioned problems. More specifically, we propose a method that is able to estimate missing exposures for HDR image formation starting from only one under-exposed shot. Estimation is done through artificial neural networks: the development of a mathematical model is a highly desirable, but time consuming task. The results are are very interesting, although not perfect, and suggest that further research might lead to a suitable solution.
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10.5446/18276 (DOI)
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So, as I said, we're going to look at a way of representing color gamuts in a compact way. And we will use a mesh estimation algorithm to do this. This is worked on by myself and my supervisor Ivar Faru. Okay, so I will give a brief outline of what I will talk about. First, some background with existing algorithms for computation of color gamuts. Some motivation for why we are doing this. We will look at the uniform segment visualization algorithm that we have previously done work on related to this. We will look at mesh estimation and what we propose as a method for computing these simple representations of the gamut. We will look at some small experiment where we compare our algorithm to the previous one. And look at the results of this. First, when you are doing a reproduction of color, you need to take color gamuts into account. For those who are unfamiliar with it, if there are people here unfamiliar with it, then the color gamut of a device is the range of colors that a device can reproduce. We have several standard algorithms for calculating the gamut boundary or the surface of this object in some three-dimensional color space, typically. And you usually use a set of colors, which are points in this color space, to find the gamut boundary. These points can then either be measurement data that you have taken from the device, or it can be simulated data using some device model. So, there are several different categories of algorithms that you can use to find the color gamut. You can either use a device model, and the gamut will then be given either implicitly by limits of the parameters that you use in your model, or you can use an explicit model of a mathematical model to represent the size of the gamut. And on the other hand, you have several geometric algorithms that will construct the boundary as a surface from a set of points. You can either use surface reconstruction algorithms that depend on having only surface points, or you can construct an object from any set of points, including then internal points from the device, from the device color space. And obviously, it would be better to avoid having internal points in your data set. But if you, let's say, have a printer with CMYK, it's not so easy to construct a data set containing only surface points in the perceptual color space that you're trying to use. Some of the generic methods that exist, that includes convex hull, segment maxima, modified convex hull, uniform segment visualization, alpha shapes, and others. We won't be looking at alpha shapes simply because they aren't much used, and we have previously shown that they don't really perform well compared to the complexity of the algorithm. So, most of you should be familiar with the convex hull, which is the smallest convex object containing all of the input points. It's easy to compute and use. You all have it in your MATLAB toolbox, I guess. And it's got well-known behavior and consistent performance. It's quite consistent for different types of data and data sets and for different devices. Unfortunately, it assumes that your gamut is convex, which it is not. So, the consistent performance is consistently bad. It, in general, overestimates the gamut volumes by approximately 10% in the labial core space. You have segment maxima proposed by Moroviq and Loo, where you perform a subdivision of the color space into segments around a center point. And you only keep the point in the segment that has the largest radius for that segment. And then you form a surface out of that. And this is, on the one hand, it's a good method because you can choose the number of segments that you use. And thereby have varying level of detail for the constructed surface. But the implementation is pretty complicated, especially in 3D. It looks quite nice in 2D, but there are some implementation details that make it less fun trying to actually use it. And if you have a data set with internal points, then there is a real risk that some of those are included in the surface structure. And so, because of this and because of the interpolation, which is necessary for segments that do not contain any of the input data, you get very varying results for different choices of data sets and the number of segments that you use. Another option is to use the modified convex hull, which was suggested by Rajabala and Dalal, where you use the basic convex hull, but you include a pre-processing step using a gamma function on the radius. So you have a center point and you move the points radially towards the surface of a sphere. That will make your data set more convex and include more of the points in the resulting surface. And you get a surface that follows some of the concavities. This is also easy to implement and it results in very consistent and good performance for almost any type of data sets. The disadvantage is that you can't really decide much about the detail for the surfaces that are constructed. And that's mostly decided by how many points there are in your data set. An example, here we have a color gamut constructed using the modified convex hull. And it contains around 100,000 triangles. It's quite nice in that it's quite accurate. It follows what you think is the gamut. But it's got so many triangles that if you want to use this in your computations, it's a problem. It's added complexity. So what we want is a method for constructing color gamuts that results in a surface that is quite accurate. And that it's close to what you would perceive as a perfect color gamut for your data set. But that way you can select the level of detail as in the number of triangles that is used. This is particularly relevant for spatial gamut mapping, where you do a lot of evaluations of the gamut surface. The alternative is to use a lookup table. But they are less precise, so you are using a representation of your gamut that is in part wrong. And if you increase the resolution of your lookup table, it will still be slow on the CPU. So basically we need gamuts or representations of gamuts that are accurate and have a compact descriptor. We previously looked at one way of doing this called the uniform segment visualization. We presented this at IRGuy conference in Valencia. We were heavily inspired by Segment Maxima, but instead of the uniform subdivision of the angles around the center point, we used segments based on a sphere tasselation technique, since this is a related problem. We are giving much more uniform segment sizes and a more accurate gamut boundary than Segment Maxima, while using a comparable number of segments. This is still not optimal, especially in the distribution of the surface points. We assume a uniform segmentation of the color space, which is better than arbitrary segment sizes, but it is not optimal. Our new idea is to use modified comic-shows as a starting point, since those gamuts are quite accurate, and try to simplify it. The way we do that is we use a mesh decimation algorithm. Mesh decimation is the process of simplifying an object surface that consists of triangles, reducing the number of triangles, but trying to keep the surface as close to the original as possible. There are many algorithms available. We tested several. We ended up using an algorithm proposed by Garland and Heckbert, which was shown to perform quite well in several studies of different mesh decimation algorithms. The basic operation of the mesh decimation algorithm is an edge contraction. We take the edge between two vertices of the surface, V1 and V2, and you combine it into one. We do this by maintaining a heap structure of the edges, sorted on a cost function, representing the error that you introduced by performing this edge contraction. This can be repeated until you have the desired number of triangles in your surface. Our method is a combination of the modified comic-shows and this mesh decimation technique. You can then specify any number of triangles for the resulting structure. By reducing the number of triangles, it's a lot faster to use for your special gambt mapping or other gambt mapping needs. We have evaluated the accuracy of the constructed gametes. We tested using 20 different RGB device models. This is useful because with a 3D device model we can compute an exact or very close and dense triangulation of the surface of the device color space cube as the reference gamete. Then we quantify the differences between the gamete boundaries computed by the algorithms and the reference. For evaluating this, we use a boxed-based method that we previously presented at the Color Imaging Conference. We do a discrete sampling of the color space and we find the difference volume, which is the volume that is within only one of the gametes, not both, and divided by the reference volume, which is the volume of your reference gametes. This will return the relative gamete mismatch. To illustrate this, in 2D here we have two gametes. You have some grid of the points that are sampled. Some of the points are within both gametes, some are only within one. You have three that are only within one of them. For this case you would then have a relative gamete mismatch of three divided by the number of points that are within the reference gamete. The result of this is shown here. We have the uniform segment visualization method that we previously shown outperforms segment maxima. Our new proposed algorithm and we see that the new algorithm performs significantly better. For comparison, we said that the convex hull overestimated the gamete volume by 10%. The performance of the convex hull would then be all the way up in the roof, since the range here is 5%. The performance of the modified convex hull is a horizontal line quite close to the end point of our proposed algorithm. An example of the gametes. Here we have the same gamete as before. We reduced the number of triangles. You get 10,000 triangles and 1,000 triangles. You still maintain most of the edges and also of the concavities of the sides. You can reduce the number of triangles quite a lot until you run into problems. But still you don't need a lot of triangles to represent your gamete. For a conclusion, we can construct a quite accurate gamete surface using relatively few surface triangles. I think it can be quite useful so that you can be sure that you are using an accurate gamete for special gamete mapping. And still allow you to have a lot of iterations and a lot of intersections computed against the gamete surface. Thank you very much. We will take the time for one quick question. One question, one A and one B. What color space do you calculate the gamete and what color space do you do your simplification? And finally, do you have experience problems when changing color spaces using your gibbets? And one B is... or let first one A... I use the LAB for calculating the gamete. The results are quite similar in other related color spaces. Similar to the structure of LAB. And second question, if the original gamma boundary that you want to simplify contains not nicely shaped triangles due to numerical performance of complex algorithm, do you have such problems? Not nicely formed triangles, I'm not sure what to mean. Very long and spiky triangles for example. Yeah, typically you wouldn't have those if you used a modified commercial on a reasonable data set. But even if you do have these triangles, it should form quite well. I think we'll move on. Thank you very much.
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Gamut boundary determination is an important step in device characterisation and colour gamut mapping. Many different algorithms for the determination of colour gamuts are proposed in the literature. They vary in accuracy, computational efficiency, and complexity of the resulting triangulated gamut surface. Recently, an algorithm called uniform segment visualization (USV) was developed. The gamut surfaces produced by the USV algorithm is more accurate than the ones produced by the the segment maxima algorithm, while at the same time, they are significantly simpler than the ones produced by the somewhat more accurate modified convex hull. In this paper, we propose a new method. First, an accurate gamut boundary is computed using the modified convex hull. The resulting surface is then simplified using an established mesh decimation technique. This results in surfaces that are significantly more accurate than the ones produced by the USV algorithm at a comparable complexity.
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10.5446/18280 (DOI)
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So, hi. So, I'm going to talk today about the spectrum of variability of LEDs with angle. Why we have considered this topic to be important. First, we will look at the introduction, usually, then we will explain the experiment setup, then we will talk about the method that we have followed, the results and the conclusions. We all know the current spectrum and core measuring devices are spectrophotometers or spectroradiometers and also the multispectral capture systems. Spectrophotometers and spectroradiometers, they measure a spectrum and get x, y, z, three estimators. Normally, from 400 nanometers up to 700 and in most cases also from 380 to 730. And they can do it in 16 channels at least and you can also get 64 channels. On the other hand, the multispectral capture systems, they also allow the spectra characterization of scenes, not only points, through several acquisition channels. These acquisition channels, they have to be more than three channels and normally they are less than traditional efferent photometers. So, you shouldn't go up to 16 or to 32 channels. And the CUTA vanyas, if they have very high spatial resolution using a CCD or a CMOS camera. So, then, effect of photometers and spectroradiometers, they are distinguished to have very good color accuracy and very good spectrum, but they only measure one point. In multispectral systems, you can also get very good color accuracy and also you have the value of being able to capture a whole image with a very high spatial resolution. So, these are the spectra sampling techniques that we can find. First, we find a technique where you eliminate the image with a white light source. But by white, we mean uniform enough light source within you from a spectrum. And then, we use trimestand filters with different channels. And we do a spectral reconstruction and we get the full spectrum of the image for every pixel that the camera can capture. And then, we do the color analysis. Another way of doing this is by using different light sources with different spectrums. And then, we can eliminate the image and capture the illuminated image. And this will be in the sense, another way of sampling or filtering the image by different spectrums. So, then, we can see that we have the two ones. So, we use white light sources or we can also use color light sources. So, let's focus on that now. Traditional light sources are trimestand or also the discharge lamps, like Shannon lamps. And lately, the use of LEDs have started to be used a lot. Why? We all know the LEDs are a small size, so that's good. The power consumption is very, very low. That also helps a lot. They have a very high life expectancy and they are cheap. So, these are the main reasons why LEDs usage in the overall lighting industry is very expect. And we will consider, okay, let's try to use them for multi-spectral capture systems. So, when you start to analyze all the LEDs that you can find in the market and you go to the manufacturers and you ask, what's in the data sheet? There are two information that they never tell you. And even if you ask them. One is the spectrum change with the angle. Is this important? We all know. And also, one more that you don't find is the spectrum change with life. I don't have time to show you the spectrum change with life because we will need some many years and here in Joenzo, it will be a very long time. But I can do a very quick test with you, an example of the spectrum change with the angle. For the good students here in the front, you can see it. The other students, well, I have also this picture. So, we see here, from there, you can see white. If I start to turn it, you don't see white anymore. Which color are you seeing now? Yellow. Yeah. So, for the people on the back, this is what you see. So, we just tested one white LED. And we said, well, maybe this is important. Although manufacturers don't tell, well, if we want to use white LEDs or any color LED for multi-spectral capture systems that we measure color. If the color of the light source changes with the angle, when we measure images, for sure, it's going to be an angle always. So, we need to control it. So, let's measure it and let's see what we get. So, what do we do to measure it? And this is our setup. We use an instrument system, STETRO320, STETRO-LESS-TERROR-REAL-DIOMETER with an optical probe, this thing here, the EOP-146. And the area, the effective area that we were measuring was 33 millimeters square, square millimeters. That's approximately 6.5 millimeters of diameter. We positioned all the LEDs in a motorized rotation system at 15 centimeters from the optical probe. And more or less, the view angle was 2.5 degrees. So, we were capturing 2.5 degrees when we centered the optical probe in front of the LEDs. We measured, well, indeed we started to measure from minus 43.2 up to 43.2. But the first measurements show that we got exactly the same, going from minus 43.2 to 0, then going from 0 to 43.2. So, you will see the data that I will show, the data was from 0 to 43.2. And the motors steps were 1.8 degrees. Okay. So, we bought LEDs from Nietzsche, Philippe Lumillet, San Centenarii, the Avago, and this, Hong Kong. So, we sample a lot of new fatuless. For the white LEDs, for those of you that know white LEDs, there are different ways of making them. In this case, we just analyzed the white LEDs that are made of a blue LED with yellow fofers. Why? Because these are the most used. Like, 19.99% of the old white LEDs that you can buy, they are made by this method. Also, for color LEDs, we also got from all these manufacturers, we got the whole spectrum, from UV to red, going from blue, to young, green, pink. We also got for every LED, different directivity patterns. So, when you go to buy LEDs, you will get the same one, and they just change the the optic to make it more directivity or less. So, more narrow or more broad. But the LED is exactly the same. And you will see what we get there. We also got two specimens of each one of them, and with the same bin. For those of you that know about LEDs, the manufacturers, they differentiate the LEDs when you buy them, and they put them together into bins. Meaning that, in theory, if you buy LEDs from the same bin, the behavior is going to be the same. In our case, we were lucky, and all the specimens that we bought, the two of them were very similar. That's why you will see in our data that we only show one, but if we show two, we will see one, and the other will be under. So, in this case, we were lucky. For sure, if you buy LEDs from different bins, the color that you will get is different. Also, we allow always five minutes to warm up. Our experiments have indicated, with five minutes, the color difference, the maximum color difference that you will get will be 0.2. If you allow 10 minutes, it's 0.1. Also, as you have seen, we have measured a lot of LEDs, so to make the time shorter, we allow five minutes because we considered that it was good enough to be stable enough. Also, while we took the measurements, the ambient temperature was kept constant. This is also very important because LEDs change behavior and change the color that you see. So, it's very important to keep the ambient temperature constant to compare. If you don't want to compare, then you don't need to do it. Which were the analysis that we have performed? First, we measured the gradients, that's what's per square meter, of corresponding at all the view angles that I have mentioned before, from 0 degrees to 43.2, of all the white and all the color LEDs. Once we measure this, we calculate the spectral differences of all the measurements, and we also calculate the chromaticity coordinates, the differences for the white LEDs mainly. Then, for the last four years, there are in the market a sector of photometers that use white LEDs as light sources. So, we analyze one of these effected photometers to see what we have found with the light sources also affect to real effect of photometers that you can buy. Then, let's start with the measurements that we have done. First, here are all the white LEDs that we have measured. And let me show you here differences. One, you can see the narrower the directivity, the higher the power that you see. So, that's something that we were expecting. One thing that I wasn't expecting is that with the same brand model, if the directivity is broader, I would expect to have the peak in the same position, and it's not. So, this also, this means like when you buy, the LEDs exactly the same, but the optics are changing, and this also affects to the color that you are getting. For those of you that are not used to white LEDs, you will see that although you perceive white, indeed here there is the blue LED, and they cover the blue LED with force force to make perceived white, but as you can see, it's not uniform white. So, this can affect to the spectrum quality that you can get, and the signal to noise is going to be different depending on the part of the spectrum that you are analyzing. So, we see here the blue LED, the yellow force force, we see here high directivity, so a narrow directivity, and a broad directivity 120 how the shape is similar, but the power that you get is lower. And also, a very important consideration with white LEDs, we haven't found any white LED yet that covers below 400 nanometers. So, we do the same with color LEDs. So, we measure all the color LEDs at the nominal angle, and this is what we get. In the same case, then the white LEDs for the same brand, different directivities, the center point is not the same, so also change. And we see that we cover from 380 nanometers up to 700. And you can even buy some other LEDs that go lower and go higher. The price changes, but it's very cheap to buy LEDs that cover the whole spectrum without any possible gap. Then, let's start measuring all these LEDs that I have shown at different angles. So, I'm going to show some examples so you can get my points, and then at the end I will summarize all. Here, I use an example. I don't mention the brand of the LED, because we haven't had permission for the manufacturers. So, I have the data, but I just mentioned that there are different brands. If you want to know the details about which brand was which, I can tell you. But in the paper, and also here, I know when to say it. So, in this case, from brand one, I analyze a wide LED of 20 degrees. And I analyze it. What's the spectrum that we get? What's the power per square meter at different angles? We start getting things that we were expecting. If I change the angle, the overall power goes down. And the shapes, they look quite similar. So, although the overall power goes down, they look quite similar. Well, what happens if I normalize it? If I normalize it, I see that the blue part of the spectrum shape is kept constant. However, the yellow part of the spectrum is not constant anymore. So, the yellow is a check that we have seen before, but here is a justification. What happens is instead of using a 20 degrees LED, I use an LED with 140. Again, we see here the same shape and how the overall power decreases with the angle. Also, the absolute power, if we compare, it's 5 times lower. So, they are broad the directivity because the LED is exactly the same. The point power is lower. So, the amount of light that you are getting in one point is lower. In this case, 5 times less. However, the spectrum change with the angle is much lower also. So, in the conclusion section, you will see that I'm going to mention this. This is, if I have to choose a white LED for a multispectral system, I would probably prefer to use a white LED with high directivity pattern because the spectrum change with the angle is much lower. I'm going to show you what we got with all the white LEDs. To compare all the white LEDs, one way to analyze it is to divide the maximum value at the blue part of the spectrum by the maximum value at the yellow part of the spectrum. This is a way to compare how much the yellow is effect, that's how we have called it, the yellow is effect of all the white LEDs. And this is what we get. We see that the narrower the directivity of the white LED, the change with angle is more steep, it's more pronounced. So, we see here this corresponds to this brand white LED of 15 degrees and when the directivity pattern gets broader and broader, you see that it's more constant and the change with the angle is much lower. Another way of looking at this is to calculate the chromaticity coordinate and make sure that differences. If we analyze all of them, we see how the difference is increasing with the angle. If we split them into two buckets, in the first bucket we analyze all the white LEDs with directivity patterns below 70, we see how the color difference is higher than those with directivity patterns over 70. So, this is another way of analyzing the same data. So, this is what we got with the white LEDs and the question is what's going to happen with the color ones. So, with the color ones we analyze them in the same way. I am not going to show all of them because there were many, as you will see. I showed these three as an example, but we got the same for all the color LEDs except for some that I will show you later. What we got is that the spectrum was exactly the same at any viewing angle. The power, the illumination power, changed, but the spectrum was exactly the same. This is very important for most spectral systems because if you illuminate an image with color LEDs, you know that the power can change, but you can calibrate that. You can calibrate for the amount of light, but calibrate for the spectrum is much difficult because that's what you are measuring. If you measure something you have to calibrate things get complex. However, we found two core LEDs that also changed with the angle. In this case, this brand one red LED with the activity pattern of 20, you see that change is largely the spectrum with the angle. And also this one, the amber color, in this case the change was even higher. From, I don't remember now the number, about 30 color LEDs that we analyzed, there were only two that changed spectrum with the angle. But this is very important because this means that you have to measure them. We cannot believe that any color LED that you buy are going to be as good as this one. So if we want to use color LEDs also from a multispectral system, we should also measure at least once if they are stable. Then it's up to us to decide if we measure all the color LEDs from the same beam, if we have time, or we just believe that if we measure one and it's good, the same brand model with the same beam, the behavior is going to be the same. Then the last analysis that we did, as I told you, we measure a real effort photometer that you can buy in the market that uses a white LED as a light source. If the white LED analysis that we have done before was well done, the measurements taken with this effort photometer should reflect what we have seen before. If we don't compensate for different heights or for different distances or for different angles, if we compensate them, then we wouldn't see any difference. In this case, we are not going to compensate for measuring at different distances or measuring at different angles. One point that I want to explain to you is how we measure this. We have a white time, we have a definite photometer. Imagine that it is a definite photometer, and we take measurements at different distances without changing the angle and then changing the angle at all these distances. When we only change the distance, what we have seen is the effect of the white LED at different angles. Why? If we are in a nominal position, we see that in this case, this circle is the measurement area. In this case, we see the effect of the center part of the white LED, the top part, and the bottom part. If the sample is moved or the photometer is moved, imagine that the sample is moved to this position here. Then the effect of the top part of the white LED is higher than the center part. Then the yellow effect that we have seen before with the angle, we should also see it here. We started to take measurements with a lot of samples. In this case, I only show you this sample of one spectrophotometer with a white tile. We calculate the delta E2000 of the nominal position up to 2.5 millimeters away from the nominal position and minus 1.5 millimeters from the nominal position. Also, we change the angle plus 1.5 degrees down to 2.5 degrees. We see a maximum delta E change of 3.5. Then the question is, what's the main influence in this delta E? It will be delta L. I'm not going to show you. Delta L has an effect because you get less power. Let's concentrate on the hue part or on the color part. It was very interesting to see that delta A almost doesn't change. You change all these positions, the angle with the effect of the automator, and the maximum change in delta A is 0.7 at 2.5 millimeters away from the sample. Then the yellowish effect should be seen in delta B. Let's analyze delta B. Yes, in delta B, we see a much higher change than in delta A up to 2. After all the results that I have shown, which are the conclusions as you would expect. White light LEDs designed with a blue emitting lead coated with a yellow emitting foveur, emitting lights whose spectrum changes with the angle. The higher that directivity, the narrower that directivity, the higher the yellowish effect. Then if you have enough power with a broad directivity white LED or with a combination of white LEDs with broad directivities, I would recommend the use of these ones. Try to avoid the white LEDs with very, very high power. You will see in the market that they are increasing their power and that directivities higher and higher. For most spectral systems, it can be a problem. With single color LEDs on the other hand, most of them, they don't change the spectrum with the angle. That's good. However, as I have shown you, sometimes you can get color LEDs that changes as like the spectrum also with the angle. We should always check when we get them if the spectrum is constant or not with the angle. About the effect of photometers, we have seen those effect of photometers that use white LEDs as light sources, they should be calibrated at different distances and different angles if we don't want to get bad color accuracy measurements depending on distances or angles. If you have a system where the distance and the angle doesn't change like effect of photometers that are touching the sample, you are not going to have any problem. But if you have a system where the distance to the sample changes using a white LED as a light source can provide bad color accuracy measurements. And also, using only white LEDs, I have shown you, they don't have power below 400 nanometers. So if you want to have an effect of photometer from 380 nanometers up to 730, you should use white LEDs in combination with UV color LEDs. With this, I think it might work. Thank you. Perhaps we have time just for a very quick question. Please. Please. Thank you very much for your talk. I have a question for the white LEDs. Is it clear that there is an angle dependence? You have two centers of light emission. Do you have a physical explanation for the red and amber LED, the change with angle? Yes, I do. So my explanation, that is the manufacturing process of these LEDs, the optics also had some coating. And this can explain that the force used for the coating can also affect to the change. If there is not optic in front of the LED, probably, probably this change wouldn't see. Like if you see, let me show you this one. Let's go fast. You see this one here. This is the pink one. Okay, this pink has two peaks. So it's only one white, it's one LED with two spectrum peaks. So sometimes manufacturers, in order to provoke the spectrum that you wish, it's not a pure LED. So they cover with the optics, they do some strange things in order to get spectrums, visual spectrums, because when you talk to the manufacturers, most LEDs are not to make sure things. The LEDs are to illuminate the places. And they sell millions of LEDs for things like this, for rooms. So the quality of the LEDs are very low in color basis, if we think. So if you want to buy really good LEDs, very stable ones for color measurements, they look at you and say, are you sure? So that's a problem that we can face in the future when we try to use LEDs for multispectral systems, that it could happen that the quality of the LEDs instead of going up goes down. Because they sell millions and millions into different markets and they don't get focused on high quality ones. Okay, thank you.
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Multispectral systems allow the spectral characterization of the scene through several acquisition channels with different spectral features. The spectral sampling can be done by using transmittance filters and a white light source or illuminating the scene using light sources with different spectral emission characteristics. Light-emitting diodes based light sources have started to be used in multispectral systems, mainly to develop low-cost devices for the industry. In this study we analyze the spectral power distribution and color variability of white and single color light-emitting diodes relative to the viewing angle, and highlight some aspects that must be taken into account if these light sources want to be used in a multispectral system.
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10.5446/18281 (DOI)
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So I'm going to present this work on supporting good enough color reproduction in non-color managed workflows, which is work that we have done in the work practice technology area at the Zerox Research Center Europe, which is located in Grenoble in the French Alps. And before going into more details, I would like to introduce the context of this work. So the context is in fact digital production printing with non-color managed workflows. So the case we are addressing is the case that we observe in reality very often is that documents are designed by document designers in working in non-color managed workflows, non-color managed environments. So in fact what they do, they design their documents, they focus on the design, the look and feel and then the attempt that is pursued with the document, but they just design it on their screen with the colors that they see. Then when they have finished designing the document, they submit it to a print shop and then they expect in return still to receive a document printout that looks like what they see on their screen, which is naturally very difficult to obtain. So they send this print shop to the print shop and then on the print shop this document is not really print ready. There are lots of color specifications which are missing. The print shop operator doesn't know which adjustment he might make and also if he observes color problems, he doesn't know how to prioritize solving them. So the result is that in fact there is a certain number of iteration cycles between the document designer and the print shop operator before a satisfying printout can be obtained. So the outline of my talk is as follows. First of all I'm giving quickly some motivations for our work. Then in the second part I'm going to present the solution we are proposing which is called print mediator. I'm going to give some details about the functionality and the underlying concepts and then I'm going to walk you through an example of the usage of the system and finally I'm going to wrap up. So the motivations as I said very often it's observed that document designers do not really use ICC color management. So we have done some studies which are referenced in the paper. So one thing you could ask yourself is is it something that you could easily change but you will say you will see that it's quite complicated because why is color management not used? It's not used because it requires for example regular calibration of all the other screens all the environment you are using. It requires controlled environment controlled lightning and it also requires an end-to-end implementation of color management because if you do a mistake at a given step then it's difficult to recover from there. Furthermore also color management is very abstract and complex to understand for people who are not specialists in color theory and color science because it's abstract and complex rather than tangible and graspable for designers for example. So this mismatches with the designers concerns and their activities and their understanding of color and it makes it very difficult for them to grasp the effects of color management controls on their designs. So they don't really know how to use color management they would like to switch it off instead of using it properly. So what we think is instead of I mean color management is something that is that is really needed so what we would like to do is to complement color management technology and to facilitate and enable using color management introducing it at a later stage. So more precisely at the stage where the document is going to be submitted to a print shop. So what we want to do is also to support the collaborative solving of color reproduction issues between the document designers and the print shop operators and therefore we want to first of all make the designer aware of print limitations because if he has included in his document colors that simply the printer cannot print because they out of the gamut then it's it would be nice already to tell him this before so that he can change maybe the colors in the documents in a way that they can be printed properly. Second we also want to make the print shop operator aware of the concerns at intense and priorities of the designer because then he can easily take the decisions without necessarily going back to the designer and discuss with him so he can then decide on proper corrections independently and finally also we want to provide a high-level interface to underlying color processing components which makes it then more easy to interact with such components and to modify the colors in the documents properly. So the solution we're proposing as I said is called print mediator and it's it should come into play at the at the moment when the designer has finished the design and wants to submit it to the print shop. So what it does first it retrieves the settings from the print queue of the printer where the document should be printed and then processes the document accordingly to this print queue and presents the designer with a comparative soft proof presenting side-by-side the original document and a soft proof of the printed version. Second it provides the designer with annotation capabilities so that the designer can specify regions where color is problematic and also specify the kind of color he desires in the output. And finally also we want to provide integration of problem detection and correction components so provide in somehow a high-level interface to underlying color processing components which will be accessible through a graphical user interface and also through natural language descriptions for example of color differences between the two versions of the document. We'll see this later in when we go through the example. So to sum up the functional layers of the system are first of all the comparative soft proof the comparative soft proof which allows to visualize side-by-side the original document on one hand and the generated soft proof on the other hand. So this will enable the user to visually assess color differences between the two versions. The second layer introduces annotation capabilities and these annotation capabilities will enable the user to indicate problematic areas in the document. We select it with the mouse for example and then specify what is the problem. He will specify the problem and the requirements he has with respect to the printout. And then third we also integrate problem detection and correction components which will then allow to indicate automatically possible color problems because they will compare the underlying numeric values in the two versions and see where there are great differences and signal them to the user. We will also provide a natural language interface to color processing components and these natural language interface will allow to describe the symptoms that one might observe and explain the causes why these differences made a call. We will also then guide the user in applying color processing components to solve color problems. So I just talked about symptoms, causes and solutions so I just want to specify a bit more what we understand by this. So first of all what are the symptoms? Symptoms are in fact user perceived color changes between the original and the soft proof. These might be either changes of a particular color throughout the whole document or it might be changes observed on particular objects and possibly on particular objects and their relations. For example you might have the case that in the input document you have specified several objects and they seem to have the same color but once they are transformed and the soft proof is generated they will be mapped to another color. So objects that seem to be the same color will now be of different color so this is something that might be very annoying and this is something that you want to signal in this case is observed. Possible causes for these symptoms will depend on the type of object for example depends if it's an image or if it's a colored block it might not be the same kind of cause and also the color specification that was used for these objects. The possible causes might also be related to a relation between the gamut of the document and the gamut of the printer because some colors might be outside the gamut of the printer so they will be necessarily problematic. Examples can be for example missing profiles in which case the system will use some default settings which might not be the correct ones. It might be also varying spot color tables for example spot colors which are defined in one way in the designer or in environment and in another way on the printer so they will come out differently or it might be out of gamut colors. Possible two solutions to such problems will be adapted to the particular combinations of symptoms and causes. For example you might specify profiles if they are missing you might modify color specifications or you might for example also change the printer if the out of gamut color is really important then you might choose another printer which can print this color properly. Once you apply solutions also you have to consider possible side effects because if you modify colors of some objects within a document then this might have some other effects on the surrounding objects for example and you might throw up new problems bring up new problems that you also have to solve again. So let's just go through an example to illustrate how the system works. So here we have a document that has been designed and it's ready to be submitted to a print shop. So the designer will go to print mediator and ask for the comparative soft proof. So what you have now is on the left hand side you have the original document on the right hand side you have the soft proof generated according to the print queue settings. So you see that there are some color differences. You can already from here the user can already specify differences but he can also ask the system to visualize what he has what the system has automatically detected. So therefore the system will map both versions in the LAV color space and compute differences between these versions. So what you see here is these all these rectangle areas are different between the input document and the soft proof and they have been signaled by the system. So now you see this little icon in the top left of the rectangle which allows the designer or the user to interact. So here we click on this small rectangle you see on the top right and you see that here the system says that the filled graphics here will be print a little darker much more colorful and very slightly less red and more yellow and this is somehow the translation in natural language of the LAV color difference observed between these two versions. So we have we work with collaborate with some researchers in the US and United States who have developed a program for natural language translation of color differences. You also have information about the reason for of this difference is because you can see here that the system has found that the specified this object is specified through a spot color but the spot color is specified differently on the designer environment and on the printer so that's why it comes out differently here. Now this is the user can say has first to say does this problem matter because sometimes the color is different but it's not important so you can just ignore it and sometimes even if the color is not very different might be really important. So in our case this is the user has said this is really an important difference and in our case this is really important because it's a company color and this is really necessary to correct this problem therefore. And finally you can have if there are some correction components available these can be directly integrated and the user can then from here activate such a correction for example in our case you could either ask the system to automatically select the closest printer spot color or he could go through an interactive spot color selection. So in this case the system will replace the color of the object and update the view and the user can go on. So we have developed this first prototype of the print mediator system and we asked ourselves then some validation questions and started to do some experiments to validate it. So the questions we want to answer the following first of all is the system usable is the comparative soft proof a usable thing in uncontrolled environments because as we said in the beginning users work in uncontrolled environments so if the system doesn't work then it's not very useful that's something that we really want to have. A second question is does the system sufficiently incite the user to the designers to specify color problems. A third question would be then the usefulness of annotations provided by the designer for the printer operators because if the printer operator do not know how to react on the annotations by the designers then it's also not very useful. And finally another question is then in the end what is the impact of the color corrections on the color quality of the printout because the aim is to reach much quicker a satisfying printout than before. So this is also something to verify. What we have done for the moment is that we have conducted a first experiment addressing the first question and this experiment involved 32 users with various profiles from designers to printers and also with various levels of understanding from the lay users to professional users. And we presented them with set of 12 documents with various characteristics and with various differences that occurred then and we tested the system on one side in controlled environment and on the other side in uncontrolled environment. So the outcome of these tests is in fact that the users perceived the differences in a coherent way. Never mind if they were designers or printers or never mind their level of experience or level of professionality. But the ways in which they describe the differences were more variable than what we expected but this is probably related to the fact that some are experts and some are lay users so they have much much more vocabulary with respect to color descriptions. And something that was highlighted by the experiment was that the user interaction design is really critical. So what we want to do is to present the user with detected differences but not to overwhelm him with thousands of differences and rather be able to filter out the ones that are really important. So to wrap up the problem that we have addressed is color reproduction in non-color managed workflows which is something that is not addressed by existing solutions like pre-flighting and soft proofing. In fact pre-flighting addresses rather the conformance of a document to a given standard and soft proofing really necessitates a controlled environment. So it doesn't address the same problems here. And the solution we have proposed is print mediator which is a system that mediates at two levels. First of all between the two workflow participants, the document designer and the print ship operator and second also between the human user and the underlying color infrastructure and the numerical representation of color. The current status is that we have developed a prototype and we have conducted a first validation experiment which seems encouraging. The next steps are to complete the validation and also to focus particularly on user interaction design. And that concludes the presentation. Thank you very much. I think there is time for one of two questions. Yes. It's PDF based. Yes. We developed it currently as a plugin. And we foresee to provide a web service for example that would be provided by the print shops because they have higher interest in in users submitting better documents so that they have easier work. Okay. Thank you again. You can.
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In this paper we propose a novel and coherent approach to control and adjust colour reproduction where strict end-to-end colour management cannot be achieved. We first recall the studies and findings that identified the need to reconsider colour management in certain workflows. We then present in detail the Print Mediator system, constituting a first attempt to implement this new approach.
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10.5446/18282 (DOI)
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As you said, I'm Rust. You can come back home after my presentation. So yeah, I'm Woseol Kwon. I'm from New York University. My presentation is a surface reflectance model based on characteristic functions. Our first introduction is from the Vultrinspectral Imaging Systems. And then I will describe a linear model of surface reflectance. And then I propose characteristic function based on image rule or priority. And experiment and result are always shown. Rust, I will conclude my presentation. This figure shows the retrospective imaging acquisitions, maybe the previous speakers talked about that. Just a camera with several filters makes an image, a retrospective imaging by refractive right on an object. So surface reflectance can be estimated from the images. This is, in general, a linear model of surface reflectance assigned or weight on the basis functions. This is the patient. And camera response is determined by the filters and right source and surface and auto receptors. At this time, the surface reflectance can be represented by some basis function and they are coefficient like this. This is the examples. There is one demonstrable and it's a spectra. And we can calculate or extract the principal component using the singular value decomposition. Finally, we can approximate the surface reflectance from images with some constraint. For example, without noise and also with noise. In this situation, except noise. And this figure I will show, I want to explain the rendering algorithm using the coefficient from the coefficient. So if ray 1, the ray intersects nothing at all and no right enter the eyes along the rays. And ray 2, it intersects the right source. We read compute the right that arrived at the eye around that way. In ray 3, in case of ray 3, we must then compute the right thing if you do from the surface patches and around the ray, back to the eyes. Now, we consider our concern is how to render packages to represent spectral interaction between right and surfaces. Common interpretation of a spectral coordinate of a right or surface is as follows. It can be possible upon these assumptions. However, right surface direction is not directly represented by component wise multiplication. So we will propose characteristic functions in the application, the rendering algorithm. This is a very simple algorithm. Characteristic function is the unistep function and non-null mapping and also going in wave ranks like this. Characteristic function also makes ordinary addition and multiplication possible for right surface interactions. Now we have to consider how to decide characteristic functions. Intuitively, the place where the surface reflectance changes rapidly provides useful information about many physical surfaces. So the basic idea is that color is determined in fraction point of surface reflectance. If any surface is continuous and differential in wave ranks, you can easily find the minimum or maximum like this. There are four examples on one side of surfaces. Blue or red is original surfaces and red is derivative. So we can easily find the mean max values just for we can say two cut point. So to find the primary two cut point, we use the total monthly color chips. This figure shows the histogram of the primary two cut points. The mode is the 400 nm and 550 nm. To more accurate two cut point, we use the CILV color difference or totally color patches of monthly. So we can find the different point two cut point. The minimum is some change in 490 and 570, some change in difference. So we said from this process we can determine two cut points for characteristic functions. Now to expand n characteristic functions, we defined priority which is grading of sub vectors. There are some examples for sub vector. Sub vector means surfaces in wave ranks but what is that? Just part. From these examples, we can extract these parameters to extend characteristic functions. Singular value and send out derivation and slope of physical component and amplitude. So this is equation. So this is we can say priority. Now this is the flowchart proposed algorithm. In characteristic functions, we first set two primary cut points for n3. And then we calculate the priorities with some vectors so we can expand the characteristic function. And we will repeat this process until the color difference is satisfied. In experiment, we used as I said, we used monthly color chips and CI, LAV color space. And for example, we just make the images according to n characteristic functions. This is the histogram of the data EIV, monthly color chips. So the error or less than one was counted only just one. So there is no zero. In this picture, we can define the read-rather end and the lower data EIVs. So if we use the, of course, if you use the more specific characteristic function, and we can reproduce accurate colors in rendering algorithm. This is the mean delta EIV and its standard deviations according to n characteristic functions. In common reading model, they show these results and for when they used five or six basis functions. And maybe it is difficult to discriminate on the human visual system. So characteristic function also maybe are similar to five and six. If we use the five and six characteristic function, and there are, the error is closed three. So maybe similar. But characteristic function is possible for the right surface interaction. This just make images just compares on this original and for using two-cut point and three, three dimensional and six dimensional and nine and two dimensional. And we will have to human the experiment for the accurate region. In conclusion, yes, the characteristic function is proposed. We based on MIMEX rule and priorities. As I said, future works, we will have to experiment with human visual system and also apply to higher order right surface interaction modeling. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Time for questions. Is there? You tested this approximation method, well, representation method with monso reflectances, which are well known not to contain any metamers. Do you see the procedure being as robust if you took more variable reflectance functions into account? If I want, you said if I want to accept monso, I did add another run, right? Which is reflectance functions that are less smooth than the monso said? I just, in the papers, I just used what is that real surfaces, leaves and what is that, the other flowers. Yes. And at the time, just for population, the result maybe will be some different. But I just focused on this, in this process, we will have to, as I said, right surface interaction and rendering algorithm. So that is my focus, yeah. Any other question? Okay, thank you.
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Surface reflectance functions (SRFs) and spectral power distributions (SPDs) of illuminants are typically modeled as elements in an N-dimensional linear function subspaces. Each SRF and SPD is represented by an N-vector and the mapping between SRF and SPD functions and an N-dimensional vector assigns N-dimensional “color” codes representing surface and light information. The N basis functions are chosen so that SRFs and SPDs can be accurately reconstructed from their N-dimensional vector codes. Typical rendering applications assume that the resulting mapping is an isomorphism where vector operations of addition, scalar multiplication and component-wise multiplication on the N-vectors can be used to model physical operations such as superposition of lights, light-surface interactions and inter-reflection. When N is small, this implicit isomorphism can fail even though individual SPDs and SRFs can still be accurately reconstructed by the codes. The vector operations do not mirror the physical. However, if the choice of basis functions is restricted to characteristic functions (that take on only the values 0 and 1) then the resulting map between SPDs/SRFs and N-vectors is an isomorphism that preserves the physical operations needed in rendering. The restriction to bases composed of characteristic functions can only reduce the goodness of fit of the linear function subspace to actual surfaces and lights. We will investigate how to select characteristic function bases of any dimension N (number of basis functions) and evaluate how accurately a large set of Munsell color chips can approximated as a function of dimension.
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10.5446/18283 (DOI)
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Je présente un papier sous le nom de Philippe Calantoni, qui a pourtant été élevé à l'étranger de cette conférence. Je n'ai pas une de la quatrième de ce papier, donc je ne suis pas sûr de tout le respect de ce papier. Philippe m'a dit que je n'ai quitté seulement 4 jours avant de présenter ce papier. Je suis désolé si je fais des erreurs dans la présentation. Si vous avez une question très spécifique, n'hésitez pas à contacter mon collègue Éric Dîner, ou Philippe Calantoni, qui est membre du Musée Louvre en Paris, dans le laboratoire de recherche associé à ce laboratoire. Le titre de ce papier est de tester la couleur amonée, afin de voir si les rondeurs de couleur de la pétier font un sentiment meilleur pour l'observer dans la exposition de la pétier. La idée ici est d'étudier, en fait, durant cette étude, mes deux collègues ont fait un expériment psychophysique dans la condition de mesopique, et je vais expliquer pourquoi ils considèrent la condition de mesopique, afin de collecter des données pour évaluer la perception subjective de la couleur amonée, particulièrement dans le contexte de l'observation de la pétier. Envers les aspects de la couleur amonée, en particulier, pour contrôler les aspects en regard de la colorisation de la couleur, ils considèrent des images multispectuelles. Après, ils considèrent des différents scénarios basés sur différents passants. En particulier, ils considèrent la couleur avrailles de la pétier, afin de dire que quand vous changez l'envers de la pétier, ça change votre ressentance en regard à la rendition de la pétier. Par exemple, ces principes ont été considérés dans différents museums, en France ou en autres pays en Europe. L'année dernière, en plus de l'écalement, la pétier était en même temps dans différents museums, avec des walls monochromatiques, en particulier en général, avec des backgrounds neutraux. Et maintenant, depuis quelques années, vous pouvez observer, dans différents galeries, que la couleur de la pétier a été spécifiquement change, selon des conditions de vision ou de la pétier. C'est le cas pour ces trois paintings, mais aussi dans différents galeries. Pour l'exemple de cette galerie, vous pouvez observer, dans les mêmes galeries, que maintenant, avant, la pétier était très blanche. En Naha, vous pouvez observer, par exemple, pour la première pétier, que Naha, le monde est plus gris. Pour changer l'émotion des observateurs, quand ils ont vu, par exemple, la nature, ici, comme tout cet outil de pétier. Alors, maintenant, j'aimerais que vous insistiez sur les couleurs de la pétier que j'ai utilisées par mon collègue. Ici, vous pouvez observer, ici, sur ce diagramme, que, en fait, considérant une pétier, mes deux collègues veulent contrôler tout l'aspect de la pétier. C'est à dire, en fait, considérer une pétier qui a été grabée grâce à un dévice spectraux. Ici, nous avons des différentes lois de correspondance, par exemple, pour cette pétier. Si vous changez la condition de lumière, et si vous contrôlez la condition de lumière, c'est possible de simuler différentes randonnées corémiques. C'est le cas ici, par exemple, avec deux différentes illuminantes. D65 ou A illuminante, vous pouvez observer que la randonnée de cette pétier est assez différente. Donc, l'émotion, à la fin, est aussi assez différente. L'intérêt de utiliser l'image multispectrale est d'améliorer votre image de couleur de reconstruction à quel point l'illuminant considère. Et grâce à la suivante question, la question de l'aspect, est possible quand vous contrôlez la condition de lumière pour reconstruire les ordinateurs XYZ et pour avoir exactement la valeur réelle compétue par cette question spectralle. L'expériment a été fait dans une condition mesopique qui vous verra après l'élection du sable dans lequel l'expériment a été fait afin d'éviter les biaises par la adaptation chromatique en particulier. Pour cet expériment, en fait, ils considèrent trois passées. Ici, nous avons une illustration d'un de ces passées qui correspond à l'avantage. Ils considèrent l'avantage de couleur de la pétier. Ici, ils ont défendu une orientation ici dans cet espace. Ils ont changé progressivement la valeur du background. Ici, dans ce cas, la valeur du background est exactement la même que l'avantage du pétier. Par la valeur progressive, selon l'uniforme scale, ils ont changé la valeur du background ici dans la direction, ici dans l'axis de saturation. Mais ils considèrent aussi une direction chromatique et aussi un espace complémentaire. Par exemple, ici, si je considère une autre pétier que nous voulons voir après, vous pouvez observer ici, par exemple, que pour cette pétier, l'avantage correspond à la valeur de cette pétier. En appuyant ici, pour l'avantage, pour l'avantage de couleur de pétier, vous pouvez observer que ici, si vous vous allez dans cette direction, ici dans cette direction, bien sûr, la couleur du background devient plus et plus chromatique. Ici, dans cette direction, la couleur devient plus et plus flashy. Ici, vous pouvez observer que les limites de ces trois parties sont données par le gamut de la gamote de la scénare que l'on utilise pour faire leur expériment. Pour l'expériment, 38 observateurs de la normale vision, qui sont participés de l'expériment, ont évalué la couleur de la gamote de la couleur de la pétier sur les roues. Ici, nous avons un peu d'interprétation du protocole que nous avons utilisé durant l'expériment. Le premier avantage de l'approche de la proposition, ici, qui est décrivée, est de ne pas prendre en compte les contenus de la dimension de la dimension de la pétier. Pour cela, nous avons utilisé une segmentation hexagonale de la pétier. Ici, nous pouvons observer, par exemple, ici, ou pardon, pour cette pétier, nous avons defini une segmentation hexagonale. Et le nombre de chaque hexagon correspond à l'ombre visuel de la 4VR, afin de ne pas prendre en compte les contenus visuels de la pétier. Le main avantage de cette technique est de ne pas prendre en compte la couleur de l'aéros dans la pétier, et non le contenus de la pétier de la pétier. Pour ces études, nous avons considéré un 7e image avec différents palettes de différents styles, par exemple, des paintings de Van Gogh ou de Renoir, mais pas seulement des impressionnistes ou des paintings de post-impressionnistes, mais aussi des paintings d'Ithaliens Renaissance, par exemple. Nous avons considéré 3 types de backgrounds, les 3 types de prévusions, les 3 types de prévusions, les 3 types de prévusions présentées. Et pour chaque path, nous avons considéré 10 types de backgrounds. Ici, nous avons une description de la scène. Les observateurs étaient juste devant la scène, à une distance afin d'avoir un fil visuel qui correspond à la vision de 4VL et de Peripherie VL. Pour la projection de l'image, ils utilisent un projecteur LCD et les participants étaient présents avec des similes de différentes images qui étaient centrées sur un background uniform, qui simile la wall sur lequel la painting pourrait être hongue. Nous avons plus de détails sur les conditions différentes correspondant à cet expériment. Vous pouvez observer en particulier que l'anglais de la vue pour la partie supérieure est assez différent de la partie la plus bas, parce que, en général, les observateurs ne voient pas la painting exactement au centre, mais à la top de la painting. Bien sûr, ça dépend de la dimension de la painting. Mais en général, dans le musée, ils tentent d'engager la partie différente à une scale pour observer cette painting dans cette dimension. Ici, nous avons un petit visage de la vue du sable quand l'expériment a été fait, l'observer était ici, et ici nous avons le projecteur de vidéo. Et bien sûr, la source de l'électronie a été élevé. Maintenant, je voudrais présenter quelques résultats. Dans la partie anatica de ces études, ils ont étudié la différence entre l'answer qui est donnée par l'observer, la différence entre l'answer qui correspond à la couleur harmonie entre le background et la painting, ou la couleur non harmonie. Ici, nous avons le résultat pour la première, la seconde session de l'expériment à la gauche de cette table. Nous avons le résultat pour la première session, et à la droite, nous avons le résultat pour la seconde session. Vous pouvez observer que les résultats sont similaires, en tous cas. Et cela se fait intéresser de voir cet résultat, en particulier ici, pour l'exemple suivant, ici, qui correspond à l'image 1, qui a été étudié, que, pour l'exemple, ici, à la gauche, nous avons un background qui correspond à cette couleur et cette couleur est en fait, la valeur avérée de toutes les pages de cette painting sont entre ces deux couleurs de couleur. Donc ici, nous avons un shaped de bleu rectum, qui caractérise la valeur avérée ou la gamme de la valeur avérée qui caractérise la distribution de couleur de la painting de la painting. Si vous changez ici, par exemple, la couleur ou la saturation du background, la couleur harmonie n'est pas assise de la même manière par l'observer. En particulier, il est intéressant de voir ici, que, ici, pour le set de résultats que vous avez ici, que la meilleure couleur harmonie est donnée quand la couleur du background est très très close à l'image de la couleur avérée globale. Ici, par exemple, entre ces deux backgrounds, deux couleurs de background, le plus harmonieux d'according à un observer différent, correspond à celui-ci. Ceci est déclaré par un observer que beaucoup d'observer disent que ce background est harmonieux, mais aussi, l'autre considère que ce background est pas harmonieux. A conséquent, il y a une petite différence entre l'observation, mais, de manière suffisante, des deux sides. Nous geometric Nos bizi vers ONE dot pas les valeurs d'image pour les backgrounds, mais les couleurs complémentaires de la peinture. Quand vous avez une peinture avec une couleur dominante, par exemple, en rède, ils utilisent un background gris afin de voir que les couleurs sont plus harmoniques ou pas. C'est intéressant de voir ici que la meilleure couleur de couleur est pour la plus d'olive. En particulier, la complémentaire de la couleur de couleur globale ne produisent pas un effectif plaisant en général. Juste le dernier résultat, ici, vous avez aussi un background différent. Il semble que l'amélioration de couleur optimale est obtenue en utilisant un couleur d'avantage, et pas en utilisant une couleur de couleur blanche pour le background. La raison pour laquelle, maintenant, dans un nouveau gallery, un nouveau museum, ils préconisent d'utiliser un background de couleur pour le monde, plutôt que un background de couleur blanche. Juste une illustration de cette idée, par exemple, pour l'amélioration du sable de Van Gogh. Ici, vous pouvez essayer d'apprécier l'accessoire de vous-même si vous appréciez plus de la couleur de couleur en ce contexte, qui correspond à un background blanc ou en ce contexte. D'accord à ce résultat, il semble que les observateurs préfèrent ce contexte pour cette image, plutôt que celui-ci, en particulier, par le facture que la couleur du background est plus ou moins équivalente à l'amélioration de cette painting. Comme ici, pour cette painting de Pierre Augustre Noir, nous avons la différence entre ce background et ce background. Les observateurs préfèrent ce background, qui est plus noir que celui-ci. Pour une autre painting de Pierre Augustre Noir, ici, vous pouvez observer que, de nouveau, les observateurs préfèrent, en général, ce background, parce qu'ils considèrent que c'est un amour meilleur en ce cas d'études que ce qu'il y a en ce cas d'études. Merci pour votre attention. Juste quelques conclusions qui, en bref, récourent ce que j'ai dit avant, mais comme je suis très tard et comme peut-être que vous êtes très stressé par le break en orderant à prendre un café, je ne vais pas insister sur toute cette conclusion. Si vous avez une question, n'hésitez pas à me poser une question générale, mais pour une question très spécifique concernant l'experimentalisation, je vous recommande de vous contacter ici, comme autorité différente. Merci. Merci, Alain. C'est le temps pour une ou deux questions. Alessandro. Vous vous inquiétez que vous êtes en train de faire des paintings, vous ne vous inquiétez pas du Renoir ou du Bango. Qu'est-ce que vous pensez? Parce que, peut-être, quand ils ont fait des paintings, ils ont voulu être vu de manière différente. Oui, dans ce contexte de cette étude, vous ne vous inquiétez pas du contenu de saison. Vous ne vous inquiétez pas du contenu de saison. Donc, en fait, quand les observateurs regardent l'image, en fait, ils ne savent pas si cette painting était pintée par Renoir ou de l'Aéros or Pantheur. Oui. Quand ils ont pinté originalement, les autorités ont probablement voulu être vu de manière différente. Je ne sais pas. Et vous avez changé la perception. Vous vous inquiétez pas du tout. Oui, je comprends ce que vous voulez dire. Ce qui sera probablement la prochaine étape de cette étude, est de déployer un background qui correspond à les idées que l'Aéros Pantheur a dans son mind. Le problème est que si ils pintent l'extérieur, vous pourrez probablement changer, selon les conditions de vue, la couleur du background. Oui, c'est possible. C'est un fil très intéressant d'interesse pour le musée, effectivement, et en particulier pour le musée de Louvre. Il y a deux questions, mais avec des décisions à la fois de la déprivation de caffeine. Vous verrez le Officiel... Mais c'est un issue fascinant, qui nous shallons vous voir plus tard.
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A set of colours aesthetically pleasant are described as in the language of human visual perception. As this encloses a subjective part, a psychophysical experiment carried out to estimate the perception of colour harmony combinations of paintings with the uniform colour of walls which they are hung. The experiment, that involved 38 observers, was based on colours built upon a specific colour flow. Participants asked to judge the colour harmony of combinations of of 7 selected paintings with backgrounds uniformly in 3 different ranges of colours—achromatic colours, derived from the global average colour of the considered and tones derived from the complementary of the average colour of the considered painting. Results demonstrate that the best colour harmony is when the average colour of paintings is used to colour background. The experiment presented in this paper shows that the white colour usually used for walls does not optimize the colour harmony.
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10.5446/21830 (DOI)
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Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Michael Bove. I'm from MIT, and I'm not only the chair of this session, but I'm also the first speaker. What I'd like to talk about today is the connection between 3D television, which is increasingly being pushed as a consumer technology, and holographic television, which we hope will soon be pushed as a consumer technology. And I have to give specific thanks to Quinn Smithwick, who is a postdoctoral researcher in my group at the MIT Media Lab, and to PhD students Jim Barabas and Dan Smalley. The three of them did all the work, so, but I get to come to China. Also, thanks to the people who support this work, and thank you to Steve Benton, who got me involved in holographic TV in the first place. So by way of introduction, and really just to position this talk relative to the other topics we've been discussing at this conference, I want to note that holographers have different feelings about things like stereoscopic television. And some holographers have an interest in all sorts of 3D imaging, and those of you who knew Steve know that quite well, that any sort of 3D technology he loved. And some other holographers think that stereoscopic 3D is beneath them, and I think we all know some people like that. But what I would like to make you think about today is that the current activity in 3D TV is doing some of our work for us. It's laying technical and creative groundwork that's going to apply when 3D TV is not just left-right stereo, but it's autosterioscopic, very, very wide viewing angle, and horizontal or full parallax. So that's going to help us bring the following generation of 3D TV, holographic TV, to market. Now, in my paper, I cite some references from 1950 about 3D television, and the truth is they are technically not all that much different from what is happening in 3D television displays today. So why is there suddenly excitement? Why when you go to some place like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, will all the Consumer Electronics manufacturers prominently be featuring 3D video displays? Well, first of all, because high definition happened, and now industry needs a next big thing, and 3D is probably a bigger thing than increasing the pixels on the screen yet again. Also, most consumers don't remember the not all that great history of 3D television, and so they aren't put off by the fact that the last few times this has been pushed, it wasn't very good. Display technology is changing very quickly, and so this is an opportunity both to slip in 3D, since you're going to be replacing your display anyway, and to change the ways in which we think about displaying video. Unlike in the past, we don't just have fixed television broadcast standards that are bringing us all our video. We have new flexible and extensible methods of representing television, and they can carry 3D formats. On Internet video, you don't have the codec hardwired into your display, you can download the codec over the network before you download the video. Blu-ray discs have the ability to evolve, so you can change the features of Blu-ray. They aren't fixed with a particular method of representing content. Lots of things like shutter glasses or high refresh rate screens for temporarily multiplex 3D or high speed digital interconnects that used to be expensive and complicated are now very cheap. So that's enabling us to do this as well. As we've seen with the example that Frank put up on the stage, high quality cameras are now small and cheap, so you can make stereo camera rigs practical and inexpensive. And there's a lot of content that's computer graphics models, and so that can be re-rendered for 3D, and more particularly GPUs are fast enough that you can do that in real time. Now GPUs are not only fast enough to give you very, very realistic 3D video games, they're fast enough to give you realistic 3D scenes in multiple views in real time. So there are lots of ways of transmitting 3D video from a source to a destination. You can first of all just send multiple streams using something like MPEG. You could interleave either spatially or temporally, or you can anamorphically squeeze two frames into one frame and transmit that, or you can alternate frames. What's more interesting and more efficient is when you code video frames to take advantage of the redundancy, not just in time, but also from one view to another. I think many of you are familiar how codecs like MPEG use motion vectors to predict one frame from its temporal neighbors. Well, you can also predict one view from its spatial neighbors. And clearly, the future is not going to be having 64 video cables going from 64 cameras to 64 projectors as we have on the screen here. It's rather going to be coding all of those 64 views together and sending them over one cable. And what has happened in the past year that's particularly relevant to solving that problem is that H.264's AVC codec now has a backward compatible amendment that supports multi-view predictive coding. So there is a mechanism in place for sending two or more parallax views reasonably efficiently. Now, you can get more sophisticated if you have more computation available and you have ways of generating a depth map, a Z-buffer, you can send a 2D stream and a depth map, and then the expectation is the receiver will compute the parallax views by shifting things differentially based on the Z values. And ultimately, certainly most efficiently, if you have a way of generating it, you could send the full 3D model and let the display render it appropriately. And there are more technical details on these in the paper if you want to track them down. But there's an important point behind all of these. And that is unlike in the past, 3D displays, even 2D displays, are now assumed to have enough local processing that the format in which images are transmitted is decoupled from the way in which the display handles them. So you can have a lenticular display, but you could send it temporally multiplexed or anamorphically squeezed frames and the expectation is it can convert them. So there are lots and lots of activities. This is just from last year what has happened in 3D TV. And there's even more than that. But again, the one I mentioned before is MPEG adopted an amendment to H.264 for multi-view video coding. It's called MVC. I think you're going to be hearing a lot about that because that will be implemented pretty much everywhere. Now, there are some other things that still need to happen. We need to have production and post-production equipment for creating this multi-view or 3D model content. And ultimately, people need to rediscover a creative and technical sense of what works and doesn't in the 3D world because there's a lot of bad 3D out there and not pretty much good 3D out there. And so some of what was known by certain low-cost cinematographers in the 1950s needs to be rediscovered. I was heartened to note that there were starting to be books coming out this year on 3D moviemaking again. And that's a topic that hasn't had books come out for a very long time. Now, of course, this is the holy grail. Princess Leia on a table in front of you. Unfortunately, I don't know where to buy the photons that will go halfway across the room and turn left. If any of you knows where to get some, I'll take a bucket full. But this is certainly what we'd really like in terms of 3D, in terms of holo video. What we get is CNN calling this a hologram, which it definitely isn't. And enough said about that. So what holo video really looks like is it looks like a hologram. It looks like the things that are on display next door except that the hologram is moving. And the hologram can be behind what you think of as the screen, which really isn't a screen at all. It can be in front. It can straddle it. And so in this particular case, that object is actually a few centimeters in front of the screen. And so I can appear to hold it in my hand. Or to make this happen, of course, you need content. Now, I want to note, and this is something that not a lot of people seem to have thought about. If you have a holo video display, it's sort of a superset because of other 3D display technologies. Since you can modulate light and you can steer it, you can take two or many parallax views. You can take light fields from integral cameras. You can take a whole variety of ways of thinking about 3D imaging. And you could put them all in a holo video display if you can do the computation locally to generate the diffraction pattern. You need a distribution mechanism. You need computation at the display. And you need the electro-optics at the display that actually turn the light into the hologram. And if 3D TV development is going to do some of these for us, then people like me don't have to invent it all. I don't have to build the end-to-end system. Rather, I can just take advantage of these things that other people are doing for other purposes. And so that's been the goal in my group for the past several years is to use as much as possible of what's already being deployed. And there are lots of people who are working on holo video. And when I make this list by holo video, I mean actually creating a diffraction pattern, illuminating it with monochromatic or coherent light, refreshing it in real time. And I'm sorry if I didn't include some of you. We like to make the distinction that our group has an emphasis on making this a near-term consumer technology. So we're trying to make a holo video display that can display the 3D content that's going to be around already that costs a few hundred dollars to build, that can use the kinds of interconnects for video signals that are already going to be on your desktop or in your living room. And in order to do that, you know, this is as close as we get to equations in this talk. We need about two, if we have a screen that's a meter wide, holo video needs about two million pixels on every scan line for that meter wide screen, which is one of the reasons that people like me and people like Steve Benton spent a lot of time thinking about horizontal parallax only because that reduces the problem somewhat. You still need two million pixels on a scan line, but you don't also need a million scan lines in the other direction. The other thing we need to do, we have to compute the diffraction pattern at the display. And what my group has done over the past couple of years and was very nice to see a number of you doing GPU programming as well is we're taking advantage of standard graphics processors in PCs and game consoles, but we're not having them output just a 2D image or a pair of 2D images. We're having them output a diffraction pattern. So if we magically tomorrow had a holo video display in your living room, but we had existing stereoscopic TV being broadcast or sent over the Internet, how would we use the holo video display to display a stereo pair? Well, the first thing you could do is just display each view at a single angle. That works. The computation is trivial for the diffraction pattern. Of course, depending on the spacing of your eyes, you need to be at a specific distance from the screen as well as at a specific horizontal position. We'd like to relax that. Since we can steer light, we could superpose multiple diffraction patterns that would reconstruct the left and right views at multiple places so that you don't have to be at a specific distance. You still have to be more or less centered on the screen. What you then probably want to do is repeat this pair of left, right views several times so the viewer could be in multiple locations or there could be multiple viewers. Now, this isn't much harder to compute than that. And if we put a little gap, then your eyes will naturally move to a place where you see both views, and this more or less guarantees you won't see a pseudoscopic image because if you can see two views, you'll see proper stereo. I think people have probably seen this photo. This is the Mark II display that Pierre Saint-Hilaire and others built in the 1990s. It looks like a science experiment. It's the size of a dining table. It has a 19-inch rack of electronics. It's about as tall as I am. It's based on the scophany diffractive television technology which came from the 1930s. We want to move away from 1930s technology. This, by the way, is a still, I don't know if any of you saw this film. This is called International House. It's a film starring W.C. Fields about the dawn of television, and it takes place in China, and the television system looks an awful lot like Mark II. I couldn't resist putting that there, but we don't want that anymore. We want something that's a monitor that just plugs into your PC. Of course, it won't look nearly as dramatic when we turn out the lights and you have this red glow everywhere, but at the same time, it's a lot more practical. What we have been doing for the past couple of years, and in particular Dan Smalley and Quinn Smithwick, is building a new display architecture that's really simple, and unlike every other scophany architecture display that's come before it, even though it is based on an acoustic-optic modulator of special kind, it doesn't have horizontal mirrors. It just has a vertical scanner, and you just sort of look down the optics toward the light modulator, and you see a whole of video. And these are the specs. This is the proof of concept version. We have a plan to scale this up. But the specs are pretty much the same as Mark II, except that we can fold the optical path to fit in a box like a desktop CRT monitor, and it's basically VGA resolution. It's 440 scan lines. Mark II is only 144. And it's based on these very special surface acoustic wave light modulators made out of lithium niobate that Dan Smalley is making for his doctoral dissertation. These are interesting because they're really cheap. These cost maybe $10 to $20. We can make them ourselves at MIT, and they have over a giga hertz of video bandwidth. So you can actually get hundreds of thousands of pixels on a scan line. And we can even make them 2D. The way that they work is if you send a surface acoustic, you have a wave guide just under the surface of the material. You couple in the beam to the wave guide, and a single mode propagates down the wave guide. If you send a surface acoustic wave across, you diffract the light. If you send a surface acoustic wave toward the source, you actually change the mode. You convert the mode, and you can cause the light to move up and down as well. What's more particularly relevant about these devices for HoloVideo is they rotate the polarization. So the first order beam, which is the one we want, has a different polarization from the zero order beam. So if you put a polarizer at the output of it, you don't need a physical stop to get rid of the zero order light coming out of here. So how do we render? Well, this is an extension of the diffraction specific work that goes back to people like Mark Lucente. We're not doing a full physical model of the scene and modeling the interference. We're rather starting with the diffraction pattern and synthesizing a diffraction pattern that's needed to create a particular light field. So you start with a chirped grating, which creates an effective emitter either in front of or behind the screen. You modulate that chirped emitter with the intensity that you want that emitter to have from multiple viewpoints, then you sum them all up and you get a horizontal parallax only hologram. And that has a lot of advantages. You can pre-compute the chirps, GPUs can do this in real time. It just, it does all of the things correctly that are really hard in physically based models like occlusion and transparent surfaces and atmospheric effects and lighting. And you can use standard lighting and texture representations. Indeed, we, our rendering pipeline is just open GL at the front. So we can plug this into lots of other pieces of software but output an HPO hologram rather than just a 2D view. There's a natural place in the pipeline to insert parallax views. If you have pre-computed parallax views from someplace else, there's a place in the rendering pipeline. You can just put them in and there's a disadvantage. Like all holosteriograms, this doesn't provide, with one exception that we know of, this doesn't provide accommodation cues consistent with virgins. So your eyes are focused someplace different from where they're converged. And one of the things that's really nice about holography is that we ought to be able to make all of the cues to 3D, all of the perceptual cues for your eyes and your brain consistent with one another. And that's a violation of that. Well, at Photonics West next January, we're going to present a solution. We're going to present holographic stereograms that can still be computed in real time but where each point in the image focuses wherever the object is at that point. And so I will just won't explain the whole thing because I don't have time but I'll give you a little hint. When you render the stereoscopic views from the 3D model using a virtual camera, you keep the Z-buffer. And then the Z-buffer tells you where that, what depth that emitter is at at each angle. So it's not a particularly hard thing and it's a process that the GPU is already doing anyway. So this January, we reported that on GPUs, we've gone from one frame per second to greater than 15. We actually have faster results than that now which we haven't yet published in the literature. And so what I'd like to do is I would like to show you HoloVideo rendered in real time from a 3D model. This is on the old Mark II display. So this is only 144 lines and this is with a single NVIDIA GPU and the codec that we used to compress this did some violence to it as well. So my apologies that this doesn't look all that good. If you find yourself in Boston, let me know. We'll show you the real thing in a couple of months when the display is a little brighter and more focused. We'll unveil Mark III and you'll see the same model at standard definition TV resolution. I'll note that the renderer runs at full speed on Mark III and we actually just sort of throttle it down for Mark II. But enough said about that, here is a dinosaur running past some trees and that has about 30 degrees of look around and that is texture mapped. The camera didn't capture it all that well. In conclusion, if you haven't yet bought this book that Steve spent many years working on and Betsy Connors and I and a couple of other people spent three years after that trying to package and put together in a book, it's available and certain starving holographers like Betsy will benefit if you purchase the book. So thank you very much for your attention and I'll conclude there. Are there any questions at this point? Michael, are you saying that at Photonix you'll be showing us the shoebox version of Mark III? Is it going to be there or is it still going to require a superstructure that's not portable? I think the main concern is that it might be a little bit too fragile to take on an airplane and there will only be one of them then so I'm hesitant to have it leave the building. We hope to have a lot of them at some point but we will definitely be showing video of our new algorithm and I hope we'll be showing video of our new algorithm shot from the screen of Mark III rather than Mark II. And so what's the dimension of the desktop device in the end or do you expect that again? The dimension is about the size of a 19-inch desktop CRT. And so the business of plugging in existing models, I guess the model is to, you know, in the same way that vector graphics, the way that flash works is that you download an instruction set and then the data is actually already there in the device. Is that what you're proposing? No, we're actually doing it more the way that real-time gaming does it where you're updating the model. I mean, we assume you'll be transmitting geometry, transmitting surface normals, transmitting texture maps and transmitting things like directions for the virtual camera. Michael, what is the display size? The display size for Mark III is just a little bit smaller than Mark II so it's 80 by 60 by 80 millimeters. Mark II is just a little bit larger than that. But you'll notice that the view volume is actually as deep as the dimensions of the screen. And when do you think we will have something like at least 15 inches of the RML display? Well, full color. Well, full color turns out to be easy. The first generation holo video display at MIT in 1990 was full color. I mean, that's only a factor of three. Scale-up is what kills you because there's a square in there. So when will we have bigger displays? Big... If you know of a source of very big pieces of lithium niobate, we could actually make that relatively soon because Dan has an architecture for putting multiple modulators on one monolithic piece of lithium niobate to make a direct view display. But the biggest lithium niobate wafers we can get are not as big as that. So, is there a source of lithium niobate as a limit? That's certainly... The lithium niobate plus the wiring to it, there are some bandwidth problems, obviously. So right now, the Mark III display uses two DVI cables from the PC. And if you imagine a tiled display, you would need two DVI or HDMI cables for each tile of this size in order to have enough bandwidth for that much parallax. Okay, thank you. I understood that Mark III display implements diffraction-specific approach, right? Yes. And did you make any improvements of this algorithm developed by Mark III Center? Yes. If you look at the... We published a paper in optical engineering in 2007 about something called the RIP algorithm, which is a significant improvement over the original diffraction-specific algorithm. What we are now doing is a further improvement over the RIP algorithm. And then what we'll be presenting next January is a further improvement over that. So we have been continuing to improve the algorithm at the same time as we increase its efficiency on the GPUs. Thank you. Mike, hi. I just wanted to thank you because I don't think your work can be underestimated. I think it's one of the most important developments in the log-of-heat we have, you know, this century. And I hope we'll live to see 3D TV before we... With much order. Thank you. Well, thank you very, very much. I'm embarrassed.
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Holographic television, or “holo-video”, has been seen by many as the ultimate development not only of holography but of electronic visual communication generally. To make widespread, successful holo-video, four things are needed: 1) content, 2) a distribution mechanism, 3) sufficient processing at the receiver, and 4) suitable electro-optics at the display, and all of these must be available at prices suitable for consumers. In the past one to two years, there has been a great interest in 3-D television, but few researchers seem to have noted that many of the recent developments in 3-D TV are also solving — or at least pointing the way to solving — problems associated with holo-video. I will examine particularly relevant developments in content capture/creation, content representation (including standardization activities), and the increased suitability of graphics processors for 3-D applications, and connect these with work at the MIT Media Laboratory in developing a holo-video display suitable for consumer use.
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10.5446/21831 (DOI)
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Okay, thank you. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. My name is Frank C. Fan. My name is Fan Teng. Teng and Frank, Chinese and English, exactly the same. It means honest. Honest means holography. So, my name is holography fans. Thank you very much. Thank you TJ for bringing this splendid conference. Come back home to China. Thank you Hans. Invited so many holography friends come to China to this splendid place to have this splendid conference. Okay, at the cost of this conference, I wish everybody have a very happy day these days. Thank you. Now, I introduced our work about 4D Fourier transform wave function and reinvention of holography. About our holog TV, holography display system. Everybody have already seen it. We've already demonstrated. Okay, let's have a brief introduction of 3D display technologies. Okay, everybody know the oldest 3D techniques, maybe it's a so-called binocular stereoscopic that is used some special instrument to make the people feel the 3D feelings by each eye perceive different images. And the second is the parallax barrier stereograms. It is invented by, it is innovated from Lipman's integrated photographic and it is popular today as another 3D display method. The recent development of the 3D display is so-called volumetric display. What is volumetric? What is volum- it is means each image we see the 3D skins in this space because each point in this space have its significant coordination. So we use some projectors and some movement, some move instrument then to make this real point existed in this space then you can feel the real 3D screen. This kind of 3D display is very complicated and it is very complicated instrument and it should be time and space calibrations. Okay, the fourth one is holography. The holography was invented in 1948 and after it is the first invention in the beginning of the 1960s by Emeritus Lease and Danny Shook it has been thought as an ideal tool to achieve 3D dimensional display for everybody. Also, holography brought us this splendid community working for MetaLife tomorrow. And recent development of holography is digital holography. Digital holography is actually to make a hologram by digital process. There are so many companies and universities are engaged in this hot topic such as Liberian M.H., JALA, MIT and so many universities. And it is now as Martin Richardson stated, maybe digital holography, maybe it's a real new science. It's innovative things just like gravity, even to the Big Bang theories. Okay, now we demonstrate everybody our method to achieve 3D dimensional holography, 3D display. It's a true color real-time holographic 3D display. In our system we have get rid of interference concept of digital holography for wavefront recording and reconstruction and directly realize true color real-time 3D holography display. That means the principle of our systems is a digital holography principle but there is no holographic recording process. It's just some new physics concept there. Okay, let's have figure out what is the function of this system. Anybody know we have there are quantized energy probability distribution around this world before the human beings and any kind of matters. Anyway, there is a quantized energy probability distribution. And this quantized energy distribution could be described as a wave function. Okay, this is how we interpret how this world is going to make any kind of object. Okay, thank you. And at any point in this space, just this space, there are parameters to describe this space. The coordinates x, y, z at the time t, but we use the vector demonstrations, vector expressions, that is r, that is this point. Just at this point there is a quantized energy probability distribution and wave distribution. This is this quantized energy probability distribution. And this wave function is this one. So, and the relationships is like this. This is we so-called the space domain description of this nature. Despite of this description, we have another description of this nature that we call it in spectrum domain. This is the space domain and now we explain the spectrum domain. Spectrum domain means this vector means the light propagation vectors. Space, spectrum domain means the quantized energy probability along a specific direction. Then here is k and the optical wave is vibrated by mu. Then you see these two equations, only the very variance is different. This is space and the time variant. This is a spectrum and a frequency variant, but all is the quantized energy probability distributions. And in the spectrum domain, the wave function we could be expressed like this. From the above sketches, we can get out the basic principles of our systems. We make the four dimensional transform of wave function. We make sure mathematics manipulations, no physics concept. Now, we just add some new physics concept on the equations of it. The quantized energy description like this is wave functions like this. And then the wave functions by four dimensional Fourier transform of this wave function. We can write it as this. Then what is this meaning? It means here they are integrals by directions and the frequencies. That is the wave function at any point of this world. They are a various of monochromatic plane waves added them together like this. In the frequency and spectrum domain, the quantized energy description like this and the wave function in this domain, they are integrals also by a monochromatic wave. But the integral variant is a space variant, each dot and dot. So we can define this as a hoax of this world. And we can also define this as a spatial spectrum of it. Now, let's explain everybody what is hoax of and then what is spatial spectrum. This figure is a relationship between location vector and propagation vector. Here is a hoax of definitions. Then what is hoax of? Hoax of is existed everywhere in this world. Now I'm speaking to everybody. We are now communicated in four dimensions holographically. Everybody see me from every directions and we are communicated holographically. Now put a black paper here. This paper stops our communications. I cannot see you, you cannot see me. It stops our communication. Now we just make a small hole on this black paper. Then our communication recovered through this small hole, pinhole, just through this. For me, this pinhole is just a light source. But this light source have already carried your information. For you, this spot, this point carried my information. Then what is that? Then that is hoax of. Hoax of just like this. And then hoax of when you move in the space, the hoax of this point, the intensity, the color, everything is changed according to the information existed there. So, and this hoax of has been demonstrated by the Leapman color photography. Like this. Each directions have different average width lenses. And then form a image here. Then each hoax of is corresponding to an image. An image is what today we have achieved, a high resolution digital picture there. Okay, this is the hoax of. Hoax of is everywhere. Then what is spatial spectrum? If we use the H, R1, H represent a hoax of, then spatial spectrum, we define it as so many hoax of, then we eliminate light in only one direction, that is the spatial spectrum. So many hoax of, then what is this? It is exactly a digital image of available, present digital play image. This is a spatial spectrum. But the spatial spectrum is just a mathematical concept. It could be realized from a hoax of, by a hoax of, and in physics and technologically, by a digital camera put at the precision of that hoax. Therefore, we can describe our visions of this world in this way. This is an inside space and this is an outside space. And we can put all camera area this way to adopt it the inside information, or put the camera here, adopt it the outside. Each camera position is just a hoax of. And the way people are here, we are seeing, I'm seeing you through so many hoaxes. You are seeing me through the same so many hoaxes. But we can do so many hoaxes to see the space. And each hoax is corresponding to a two dimensional image. That is to say, by a lot of so many two dimensional image and the hoax of pairs, we can recover this space strictly. This is spatial spectrum language. Yeah, for visual. The hoaxes everywhere. How we achieved that? How we achieved that? How we used the plane to simplify the process. This is a plane. We put, if we put M multiply N cameras at M multiply N hoaxes of the original spaces just like this. Then make, collect the spatial spectrum of the existing object at each hoax of positions. Then we can get M multiply N digital images like this. This is so called spatial spectrum collecting. Okay, after all the spatial spectrum, sampling spatial spectrum collected we can use M multiply N projectors to project it, to elect the spatial spectrum back to the original places. Then there is an optical field formed here, inherently. Exactly the same as collecting optics. We just project it back all the information conjugately. Then we can get an optical field, the sampling optical field of the original space. Okay, if at this original space there is nothing but a transparent window here, what the eye could see? Let's think about it. There is a field, optical field here. But if nothing is here, only M multiply N projectors projected the information of the original. What the eye can we see? What can we perceive? We can only see M multiply N light sources from the projectors. It's nothing. Just I'm here. I can see nothing. The image is here. I can only see that, that point. And the second projector here, then two projectors, two point sources. M multiply N, M multiply N, white light sources here. If we put nothing at this recovered space. At this time, actually the spatial spectrum is discreeted. Just because of this discreeted information, which is not enough to form the final information here, you can only see discreet M multiply N light sources here. You cannot identify what is detailed in this space. If we put a conventional diffused screen, for example like this kind of screen, then what happened there? Each spatial spectrum has this individual images on these screens. And you can see a lot of images heaved here, overlapped, but you cannot identify the details because they're overlapped. Last sketch is only one spectrum there, then you can get a distinct image there. It's exactly the same as our two-dimensional display. And this sketch is for, if the M multiply N projectors, projected information simultaneously, then you can, a lot of images, heaved it here, you cannot identify the details of anyone. If we put a functional or holographic functional screen here, what is the function of this functional screen? This functional screen's function is only to spread one spectrum of projectors to spread only with a limited angle. And then to let the areas, brightness, full of their area, but not overlapped. Then there is a spatial, output spatial spectrum of what exactly the digital holographic give, just like this. Then you can see a real 3D skin at this area. Then the functional holographic functional screen's function is only just make the inputted light spread in limitations for what you want. If we use not the M multiply N area, just a horizontal area, collector and projectors to accomplish this process, then we can achieve the horizontally only projection, that is, our systems. Our systems just make a limited spread in this, in this direction, and a wide spread diffused in this direction. That is, a typical strip speckles for their patterns. So this is a typical strip speckles. Okay, then what is the most important, the most important is this angle, omega N, we named it the ampouling angle. That is the angle of each camera or projector corresponding to the original or recovered space. If this angle is, this angle is, as soon as this angle increases, the 3D recovering fidelity decreases. Okay, how we achieve the functional, so-called holographic functional screen. This is a simple object to achieve it. This is a conventional diffused glass. You use a laser beam, and then there is an aperture, open aperture here. You just control this open aperture's size, and then you can make, you can make, control the open aperture's angular as omega N, what? Yeah, by this one. Then you can realize the output of omega N as I mentioned it. It can also be used by holographic lens. Yeah, this is a holographic lens optics. The laser's coming here, and then focused here, and we can find the apertures of the lens here as omega N, and use a reference beam. This is a typical off-axis holographic lens, micro holographic lens. And we could get the output of omega N. Okay, finally, the so-called recovering fidelity of a 3D space like this. In this situation, each light rays is now changed to light keepers like this. This is omega MN. That is, when the depth is increased, then the image, the function of the point spread function have been increased. If this increased value is not more than the Huxer size, we are thinking it's distinct. So we use this to make the definition of the recovering fidelity of 3D space. Okay, this is what we use that to describe. This is a calculation result according to the analysis above. That is, the sampling angle is pi multiplied by 10, and then the fidelity should be the up to 12 mm. And if the sampling angle is like this, then the biggest recovering space should be 1.112 like that. And in the practical situations, the depth would be more few times than these values. Okay, this is our experiment sketch. Here we have a 64 camera and a projector here. Our first type is only 30 cameras anchored to an original space here. And then use the UV-AV cable to connect them directly to the projectors here. And then project each image on this self-made functional screen here at the reference surface. Okay, and then we can see the three-dimensional effect. Everybody has already seen it. Because of this, we have this system. We have a prospect. We call it HIT engineering, maybe holographic information technology engineering. Because we have now go across recording material and interference process and achieved the holographic display directly. And connected to the present IT achievement tightly. So we could declare that the holographic display is just the linear aggregations of the present IT achievement. So it is time for us to carry out the holographic information technology. And this technology, there are three key points of it. One key point is micro-hot. Micro-hot means, yeah, not Microsoft. Micro-hot means we minimize the camera, we minimize the projector, we minimize a lot of hardware today. That is micro-hot. And the second is the Macsoft. The conventional IT software only controls one spectrum of information. Now we have already aggregated so many spectrum information sets. So we need powerful computers and powerful softwares to manage all the information in electronic forms. And finally, use the Microsoft and the Macsoft, for what? For photonic management. To manage the photonics as whatever we want to display any kind of 3D. We can imagine. This is some cases we can imagine. We can collect the information with a curved surface. We can also broadcast it or recover it in a curved surface form. We can make it sampling inside cylinders types. That means the conventional cylindrical holography, this size, this is cylinders. We adopted the information inside. And then, recover is inside, everybody see it inside. This is a projector. This is a functional screen. We can also adopt it in outside silenjo-cube display. We can use the camera here to adopt the information like this. And then, we make it displayed like this. Human beings stay inside this cylinder and see outside the skin's 3D dimensional. We can even make a disk type. The so-called collecting by arc structure. In this building hall, each light, let's imagine it a camera here. And the intensity and the density is so dense, enough dense. Then, we can collect all the information here. And then, we make this type of recovery. That means we can move a suitable game to a table for everybody to see a suitable game on the table. Okay, congratulations. It is a simple accumulation of available IT achievement by holography sort. It's finalizing the human beings' ultimate dream for 3D communications in the Morrison contest of reshaping present IT industries, required by inevitable civilization alternation of 21st Photonic Dynasty. Thank you for your attention. Any questions? Any questions? I'm Kave from the Holography. Very impressive display. We've all seen that. My only question is, is it fair to call it holographic? From what I understand, it's only... There's a holographic diffusing screen. So, although it's an extremely interesting technique, I don't think it's holography, to be honest. This is a very, very good question. I think... let's invite Stash. Come here to answer this question. Stash, where is Stash? Is it holography? Yes, Stash, because Stash is specialized in digital holography. Yes, for me, it's definitely holography. Because what actually holography does? It provides information to your eyes from two perspectives. And if any other tool will give the same result, then you will perceive three-dimensional image. And for me, this is holography. Okay, let's... we can also tell that for... You can call... You can call it... Thank you, Stash. Any questions more?
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Fourier Transform is well known the fundamental theory for information processing. It has been successfully adopted in the whole IT industries respectively with 1D for signal communication, 2D for image processing, and 3D for color recognition. In this paper, we propose to make four dimensional Fourier Transform of wave function (or the probability amplitude) f(x, y, z, t) of the quantized energy probability distribution I(x, y, z, t) of this nature to bring up a new description of light with its two kinds of spectra— temporal spectrum and spatial spectrum. We shall expand the concept of spatial frequency in nowadays imaging system as the spatial spectrum owned by the nature itself while the reconstruction of a complicated wavefront (i.e. both amplitude and phase ) in holography into the recovering of spatial and temporal spectra of the nature itself. Real time holographic display for holographic video is also demonstrated as the application of this theory.
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10.5446/21833 (DOI)
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Good afternoon. I'm from Anhui University. This paper is about fractional Fourier transform algorithm for the holographic display. First, the instruction. As you know, holographic display is the most advantage of the three-dimensional display technology, which has become the popular topic in the field of optical and computer research. Face-owning hologram calls for concern because the diffraction efficiency can reach 100% in the ideal case. In order to obtain face-owning hologram, firstly, face-owning information of constant amplitude calculated by the original OIL, which is also known as face retrieval. There are two types of numerical algorithms of face recovery. First is the ratio, and second, the direct solution of equations of transmission intensity. It has become one of the major research methods that using the relative numerical algorithm for face retrieval based on the intensity of light. In 1972, the GS relative algorithm was proposed by Gushberg and Schakchen and improved algorithms such as RE, IO, and BIO, YG, and so much come forth on the basis of GS. However, these algorithms have iterated uncertainty, poor anti-noise performance, and other shortcomings such as the ability of full convergence. Fractional Fourier transform was put forward in the 20th last century and was introduced to the field of optics in the 90s. Compared to traditional Fourier transform, the fractional Fourier transform is more general, flexible, and convenient to deal with, and also intrinsically linked with the Fresno diffraction. A Fourier transform can be used to describe the far-field diffraction, and the fractional Fourier transform is used to describe the near-field diffraction. The research of fractional Fourier transform in recent years has made great improvement, which has brought new opportunities for the optical information processing technology. In this paper, the relative fractional Fourier algorithm was used to get a fast-owning complex wave. If using conventional coding methods such as the 12-phase coding method to encode a wave function, the zero-order diffraction spots are very difficult to emulate, and for the larger pixel images, it's rather difficult to have a good hologram. In this paper, binary coding method is adopted to emulate the zero-order diffraction in theory. Hologram beta can also be generated for the larger pixel images. The generated hologram was reconstructed with DMG, finally. In this paper, three contents of the paper is about these three contents. The first is the radiofractional Fourier algorithm was used to get a fast-owning complex wave. The second is the binary cosine coding method was used to generate binary phase only hologram. The third is the generated hologram was reconstructed with DMG holography displacing scheme. First, the fast-fractional Fourier transform algorithm. Let us suppose the input signal is fx. This equation is the one-dimensional p-order fractional Fourier transform. This is a pure mathematics equation, and the p is the fractional order. The fractional Fourier transform equation is always denoted as this equation, but there is also another. According to the second type of optical path, that's the two-length optical path, like this. We can get another form of p-order fractional Fourier transform equation. This equation is according to the Roman second type optical path. In this path, the f1 is the standard focus length, and the z is the distance between two lenses. According to this equation, we can get a fast algorithm of fractional Fourier transform. The flow chart is as follows. This is the flow chart of the fast algorithm fractional Fourier transform. In fact, there are three steps of this fast algorithm. The first step is phase transform of the first lens. The second is free space fractional distraction, and we use angular spectrum method. The third step is phase transform of the second lens. In this flow chart, m denotes the object plane. This m denotes the Fourier plane, and this m deforms the fractional Fourier transform plane. In fact, this fast algorithm is based on the FFT. We use the fast fractional Fourier transform to iterate with the phase of the original wave. This is the iterative fractional Fourier transform process, just like the traditional iterative Fourier transform process. The difference is here and here. Here is the fractional Fourier transform, not the FFT, and here is the inverse fractional Fourier transform. This is the original wave function. After the fractional Fourier transform, we get the spectrum of it. We can change the amplitude to constant, always is unit constant. That means a equals 1. Keep to the first phase, 5. Then we get another spectrum, like this. Here, a is unit. That means we get a phase owning wave. Then we use the inverse fractional Fourier transform here. After the inverse fractional Fourier transform, we get this wave function. Also, we constrain the amplitude to the original amplitude and keep the phase. This process goes on for more and more. In this work, there are about 500 times of the iterative process. After the iterative process, we get the phase owning wave function. Then the binary coding of cosine, that means when we get the wave function of the phase owning wave function, how we get a program? Someone calls the phase owning function a kilogram, but we want to re-experte the program in a DMD. We want to encode the phase. As we know, a phase owning wave function, FX, can be expressed as this. According to the OLA formula, it can be expanded to this equation. The conjugate function of FXY can be expanded to this equation. From two above equations, we see that the cosine theta equals this one. That means the equation contains the phase owning wave function and its conjugate wave function. The coding is if cosine theta is positive or larger than zero, that cosine theta equals one. If cosine theta is negative or smaller than zero, that cosine theta equals zero. That's the coding of cosine. I call it the binary coding of cosine. The encoded image contains only phase owning wave function and its conjugate wave function without any zero-order items. The so-called binary code is to encode wave function into black and white grayscale holograms. That is, the value of the hologram transmittance function is zero or one. After that, we get the binary phase owning hologram. This is the original image. This is the panda and this is the hologram, the binary phase owning hologram. This is the reconstructed image by the computer. Finally, we reconstructed this hologram in DMD. DMD, that is digital micro-mirror device, is a product manufactured by TI. The DMD we used contains 800 multiplied by 600 micro-mirrors. Each pitch is 60 micro-mirrors multiplied by 16 micro-mirrors, capable of aluminum mirrors. The gap between each adjacent mirror is one micrometer. This is our DMD holographic display system. This is the DMD and this is the laser, the special filter. We reconstructed the image via DMD like this. This is only when order we take photos of it, the others is cut. That's my little work of the holography. Thank you. Questions or comments? You said you made 500 iterations. My question is what is the refreshing rate of the images? What is the refreshing rate? You perform one image and after that, what is the time interval between showing both images, the next image, the refreshing rate? How many images you can show per second? Okay, maybe we'll discuss later. The home-manning images, images display system. Just like the video, like DMD is the kinds of video. Just the same as video. We will talk.
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In theory ,the diffraction efficiencies of kinoforms that have properly graded surface relief gratings can reach 100%.When the amplitude of object function are known and its phase are unknown , an iterative Fourier transform process of error-reduction algorithm is usually adopted to retrieval its phase spectrum. When the amplitude of result is a constant, it is so called kinoform type or phase-only hologram. The phase spectrum reserves not only phase information but also amplitude information of original object function. In this paper, a specific fractional Fourier transform for Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) is presented instead of Fourier transform and the typical constrain of the error-reduction. There are several advantages of the proposed method. Firstly, a fast simulated algorithm of fractional Fourier transform based on FFT are used to more flexible express the propagation of optical wavefields and improve convergence speed in iterative process . Based on the flexible expression for the propagation, a fast shifted Fresnel or fraunhofer transform can be used in a uniform equation to develop a tiling approach to hologram construction and reconstruction, which computes the propagation of different distances between parallel planes having different resolutions. Secondly, a combinational optimal constrains for DMD is used; they include of the microstructure of the element, Phase Modulation Properties and switched blazed grating Properties.The binary coding and the results of numerical and optical experiments are presented the results given is improved obviously in image quality and diffraction efficiency.
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10.5446/21835 (DOI)
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Good morning China, good morning world. So now we are having session on digital holography. And thank you Frank, thank you committee to invite me here. And I will give you presentation about Jealous Advances in Digital Holography. My talk will cover more than 10 years of our research and development including the latest ones that we performed this year. Can we switch off the light? Thank you. So advances in digital holography. First of all I would like to introduce you Jealous Company possess to doesn't know it yet. So Jealous means general objects laboratory. Jealous was founded in 1995 and in operations in there. And digital holography field we entered in 1998 after visiting exhibition where we were displaying our analog camera. And a lot of people were asking is it possible to reduce the image, is it possible to have colors and our answer then was no. So even somebody was asking us why you are here, digital photographers. So we decided to go to digital direction. And now we have basically two companies doing that. It is Jealous Digital Lithuania. We are doing research and experimental manufacturing. We have technologies in United Kingdom which does theoretical work and David Ratliff runs it. For those who still do not know where Lithuania is, Lithuania is here. It is nearby Poland and just across the sea to Sweden. So what we did good in holography? We have invented digital holographic printing with pulse lasers, hologram copying, imaging for digital holographic printing. And recently we have developed holographic reflection screens for autostereoscopic projections. So we are doing custom research manufacturing consultancy, holographic photo materials distribution. And we have manufactured some nice machinery like pulse RGB lasers, digital holographic printers, imaging devices, high power lasers. And we still are manufacturing analog holographic studios. I am quite surprised but each year we are selling one analog equipment somewhere. And we are also manufacturing special lasers for some scientific applications like nuclear fusion seedings and something like that. So what is digital holography? Digital holography by our definition is dot by dot photo materials exposing technique. The object beam is formed by spatially modulating one of the laser radiation beam and another beam is used as reference beam. And special modulation is performed by OCD displays, modulation patterns calculated by computer. And information for pattern calculation is extracted from sequence of digital photographs. And this digital photograph shooting is of course geographically separated from printing, like in usual photography. And digital holography has of course very big advantage over analog holography because it has full color, repeatability. You can adjust your scene with computer, you can get animation, great viewing angle, and we can make holograms in size of up to 1 to 1.5 meters. But of course digital holography has its own limitations. And the biggest of those limitations was production speed, computer generated scenes only when we entered this domain, and efficient, not efficient lighting. And we have developed some solutions to that. So production speed, we recently have developed new lasers with diode seeding, and we have invented a new hologram copying method that speed up very greatly digital holography. Computer generated scenes only we have solved by inventing live scene capturing device and mobile phone holography. And also we have made some efficient lightings. And even more, we have found new application for digital holography, this is the stereoscopic projection screens. So now let's go to each of those topics in more details. So how this dot by dot exposure is done? We are writing holo pixels. It's pretty same like Zebra does writing their holo pixels and how it is done. We are using LCD to display certain pattern and laser beam passes LCD and becomes an object beam. After that we are focusing this object beam to square, which has size either 0.8 or 1.6 millimeters, and heating photo material. From opposite side comes reference beam. And exposure is done, then we are shifting holographic material and exposing it again and again and again. And since we want to make color hologram, we need to expose each small square three times. And we are doing that with post laser. Now, from where to get this special modulation pattern? It's very easy. We have, let's say, video file. And we are extracting frames from this video file. And after that we are taking from each of those frames, we are taking one pixel from each. Pixel shows you have the same coordinates. And from those pixels we are calculating one holo pixel, calculating pattern and projecting it to LCD and then exposing photo material. So now from where to get those files for digital hologram? It is also quite easy. Yesterday you have seen camera that Frank is using here. You can have one camera with wide angle, which goes just in front of the steam and makes shooting. Also you can render frames in 3D design program, like 3D studio max or something like that. Limitation of the scheme is that you see a viewing angle of this camera is quite wide and the scene is rather small. So not all resolution of LCD is used to get the image of the scene. So when we have entered digital holography, a lot needed to be done. We needed a lot of tools. First of all, photo material. Photo material did not exist at that time. There was no civil light material, sensitive for post-radiation and being color. Also we needed holographic printer, holographic copier, professional life imaging device, a motor life imaging device, hologram lighting and of course we needed some applications. And those just imaging applications are not really industrial ones. People prefer to have something more general. So, photo materials needed. Let's briefly discuss which photo material properties we need to consider. It is silver halide, it should be, because photopolymer is not sensitive for post-halo-graphy. And grain size, if you want to record color holograms, should be about 10 nanometers. It should be panchromatic and also it should be available in industrial quantities. So this material we have developed together with our partners from Russia, companies FiraS in 2000. This material has grain size 10 nanometers. Here are some properties of this photo material. You can find it in proceedings. And this material is sensitive for RGB post and continuous wave radiations. And our Russian partners can manufacture it in large quantities. The volume coating is 1000 square meters. And we have manufactured first digital holography printer in 2001. This printer was able to print master hologram for future copying and also reflection holograms directly. This printer was printing on photo-human photo plates, with a pixel size and laser flashing frequency, it has 30 hertz. This printer we are using until today and printing several meters per month each month. And here is a picture of this first holography printer. And to give you an idea which size it really was, here is another picture of this printer. So you see it was quite big. And now, but this printer has only 30 hertz laser, which is really not quite speedy. So we have designed now second generation printer with L-Cos display. It is a reflective display, not transmission. And the display itself has very little losses. So we can use less powerful laser and make this laser flash more frequently. So with this new design printer we can go down to 25 x 25 millimeter holography pixels. So increasing resolution and laser flashing frequency can go up to 200 hertz, including the speed. For that we have developed Pauster RGB Short-Cavity Laser, especially for that. So now contact copying. Of course if you want to make a lot of holograms, you cannot wait till printer will print dot by dot. You need to copy them. But usual contact copying, what it does? You have laser beam, here is projection to master hologram plate. Here you have your slit. Slit we must to have because our holograms are big and there is not enough laser energy to illuminate all holograms surface at once. So we need to have slit. So usual holographic copying was running slit like that in this direction. But then look what's happening. We have our laser beam that hits master. Master plays in perpendicular direction and reference beam and object beam matches only here. That means that in this area and in this area noise will be recorded. Which is not good, of course. So what we did? We decided to run slit in this direction. Very simple element solution. So then we have this picture. We have our laser beam that hits master hologram, master hologram restores. And we have interference on who copy surface and we are not recording any noise. Well almost any noise because you know the hologram replace also little inside. But this method allows us to do quite nice hologram copies. What we are lacking now is photo materials that would be sensitive more in blue region. We can do copies with high efficiency in two colors red and green. And blue gives only 50% efficiency from the master. And here is how our hologram copy of laboratory prototype looks. And here is real setup. Here we have laser beam coming, adjusting beam, making slit. And this mirror goes on this translation stage. Direct slayers slit here and here we have our copying material. So now about life-stain capturing. As you have seen yesterday this device shoots only small use for region. Which is not allowed to use all CCD surface. And usually if you even will take the highest resolution camera here, for 1.5 meter hologram you would need to have horizontal resolution of this high speed camera, 3,000 pixels. I do not know if such cameras exist or not, but I believe that not yet. So it is not really good for life imaging if you want to capture some big scene and imprinted on a huge hologram. So instead of that we have developed this kind of equipment which has rotating camera. It shoots only what is needed to be shot. So then we can have 4.1 times 1.5 meter only this resolution. And such camera exist, you can easily obtain them. And we have constructed such kind of device. This is our portable one, the first one you have seen it in Wales. And here is studio that you also have seen in Wales. And this device allows us to make professional video capture for holographic printing. At the moment we have sold 9 of such devices and inquiry is welcome of course. But this solution is good for professional hologram shooting. And my goal always was to make digital holographic available for common people. So for that we have invented mobile phone holography. As you have seen before our hologram has rotating camera. So what we have if we rotate a scene and have a studio camera. This experiment is to perform in computer of course and what we did. In 3D studio max we have modeled how it would look like, the sculptures. Here is top row is images taken by rotating scene and steady camera. And this is images taken by rotating camera and steady scene. As you see they are quite different. But this difference is not so big if we will take a look on the central part of the shots. And central part looks almost identical. So what we need to do is just this is a bit smaller. So if we will reduce under certain algorithm side images. We will have perfectly suited images for holographic printing. And here you can see how they match. That's how the holography became available to common people. So in 3D he has mobile phone with high resolution. So the guy is just asking his girl to swing head slowly from left to right. From left to right this is important. And after that the video that is shot by this mobile phone can be sent to us using the same mobile phone. Because internet usually survive on mobile phone. And we are printing hologram and sending it out. So of course on the printed high-lumogram is how we are calling our digital hologram. So here are the other body parts that we are rotating. It will be three dimensional. And background will be two dimensional. But of course it is limitation. But if you want to surprise your friends or to memorize your grandparents, children's pets. I think this is very good stuff. And that's made mobile phone holography available for everyone. So now we have issues with lighting. You know that full parallel parallax hologram lighting you can use only one light source. Which is great limitation. And if you want to have really bright hologram you need to have very bright point source. That is difficult. The solution because you have great energy waste here and here. It's not good. It was some assumption to solve this energy waste problem and trying to concentrate with parabolic reflectors. Concentrate light to eliminate hologram. But of course this solution is quite difficult to implement and too complicated. But digital holograms, our digital holograms they have single parallax only. And that means that we can use as many lights as we want. Put them in vertical line and illuminate our hologram. Of course we have some energy waste here. But anyway it becomes already better. But we can do it even better. We can direct each light to certain surface on a hologram. And still we have good holographic image replay. So we have invented this kind of lighting. This feature and each bulb can be rotated in two directions. So you can really point where it need to be pointed. And of course it brought us some usual application for holograms. It's portrait, everybody knows that. Everybody sees that. So shooting is done with hologram, 5-6 inch hologram and printing and sending it out. And we have as I said 9 holograms currently operating. For museums we did some work. For example here is hologram of mommy. From one side it is covered with bandages. And then it comes naked. So images obtained from the scanner. So again hologram shots and we are printing them. Architecture it's easy to be visualized. Here is holograms that we made for Ikuonakamura. So in the middle we have house. And on sides we have drawings of this house. This is architectural installation that we made for DDB. In Vilnius they were building new building. And we made holograms of this building. And designers made this kind of presentation. Usually for architecture we are using 3D cut programs. Engineering visualization from the same 3D cut programs can be done easily. Medicine, this is interesting. This hologram I made from tomographic slices. I took them from internet, put some color. And it became actually a document which you can use and you can store it. And it is quite easy to see what is going on inside human body. On one hologram. You can be used for teaching what we did for some American companies. Advertising, it's usual application. Not interesting at all. And holography for common people of course. It's our recent application this year we started to advertise it. And there is one unusual application that we also invented 2 years ago. We created a new application called image plane. And we suddenly realized that any reflection hologram which has image element that appears in front of the image plane sends the light to form this image element. And this reflection hologram ability to redirect illumination light to certain places in space can be used for autostero scoping needs. And in digital holography cases it's quite easy to print reflection hologram with desired characteristics. So how it works? This is me. And I'm looking to hologram which has one stripe. I'm looking for a far distance and I see this stripe appearing in the air. It's nice usual. But when I'm placing my eye inside this stripe, so then I see full screen illuminated by this lamp. So now what will happen if I will use two lamps? One lamp will give one image element replayed and I will see it. Another lamp will give another element replayed. I also will see it. So now I'm coming closer and suddenly my one eye see screen illuminated by one lamp and another eye see screen illuminated by another lamp. So now let's replace those lamps with video projectors. Focus them on the hologram surface. And then we will have our two images delivered to our eyes and brain will calculate three dimensional pattern. It's pretty similar like Frank has here. Just we're using two projectors. And this device is designed for one viewer. The advantage is that we can use high definition projectors and deliver full high definition images directly to human eyes. So here is our setup. Here is real photographs of those two viewing zones. And what is good with hologram using for this application is that our viewing zone depth was 15 centimeters. That means that if you are 3D designer you can have high resolution images and comfortable work on your computer viewing them. This is more something. We will read that presentation. And those which are advantages of this graphic, Autostereoscopic screens. It's easy to manufacture. Viewers not bound to strict distance from screen. And video projectors, what is important, can be placed on tiny distance from screen. I believe Frank in your system you have, you need to place projectors at certain distance probably. But in our setup we can use any projectors. We'll place them at tiny distance and we will have this stereoscopic. So now we're coming to conclusions. When Chola entered into this digital holographic business nothing was developed. We needed photo material so our partners invented it with our help. Holographic printer with post lasers invented by Chola. And what is interesting at the same time, Zebra placed their patent. Our patent application we have placed in 99 December in 2000 January Zebra placed their application for pretty similar printer but with continuous wave lasers. Holographic copier invented. Life imaging device also is done. Mobile phone video holograms from lighting and applications. Everything is done. So I would say that digital holographic tools are developed. So now to place that further to the market we need to have some industrial partners which I believe will come one day. But indeed complete range of necessary equipment and materials for digital holographic has been developed. Digital holographic geographically separates imaging of hologram printing and copying processes. Life sense for the printing digital holograms form can be easily captured by common people. Digital holograms can be printed and copied with speed needed for industrial applications. And more digital holographic can be used to notice the rescopic projection screen manufacture. That's it. Thank you. Any questions. In the copy machine is a laser full color or single color. In copy machine we are using the same laser so that we have developed for printers. So it's post lasers. It's RGB full color. And laser that we're using it's 660 for it. 532 for green and 440 for blue. After development of the chemical processing we have usually wavelength shift. So it becomes 640, 520 and 415. So blue is really not nice. But what I would like to point out that it is not like in usual analog holography. In digital holography you can calculate the right white balance. And even if you are using not the right wavelength you will have the right colors anyway. Any more questions. Question about your projector. Can you project the still images or can you project the film or what is the quality for input let's say for projectors? Yes we can project pretty everything. We can project stereo pairs. We can project stereo movies. And there are even programs that you can easily obtain. And those programs are producing stereo stream pairs. So you can take usual DVD movie, put it into this program which costs 50 dollars. And then you have two video stream outputs. You really can watch any movie in 3D. Dimension we have tested 640 times 480. So it's a big display. Thank you Stas. Just a bit of a technical question here. The sequence of colors when you are exposing the film is there a sequence? Is it RGB or blue, green, red? Actually it is black and white. We are projecting inside the projector. In the printer we are just making color separation on the software and then projecting black and white which we have obtained. Three black and white. Where? In the sequence of exposure. Ah, sequence of exposure. Yes we are exposing first red, then green and then blue. Actually that's why, first of all it happened historically. When we were designing our first printer it was obvious that we want to have RGB projector so let's put these objectives RGB. But then something like three years ago I have investigated that thing because we needed for copying to define if it's important the order of exposure or not. And I realized that indeed it should be RGB. First we need to expose in red, after that in blue, in green and at the end of the day in blue. And type things that it is because first of all we need to feel red levels, after that green levels and blue levels. It's energies. And if you are doing that in other order the results are not so good as in RGB. I'm surprised. Technical question, I don't quite understand how the pixels are formed. Question is what determines the angle of view of the final hologram? Is it the objective, the Microsoft objective that's printing? And what is the maximum, what is the limitation on the view of the final hologram? So indeed objective that we are using in our printer limits the viewing angle. And if conditions are ideal, I mean conditions of eliminating hologram are ideal so then we can get to 89 degrees which is angle of objective. But usually conditions are not ideal so most frequently you will get 75 degrees in horizontal and you will have 35 degrees in vertical. More? Okay. Thank you.
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In the article are described the latest Geola’s inventions rising the digital holography development to a new level, which allows mass-manufacture of large size digital holograms – i-Lumograms, as well as manufacture of colour reflection holograms for security applications. All that became possible by developing a full range of necessary holographic machinery that includes digital laserless life scenes imaging equipments, digital holographic printers and copying machines where our new copying method is implemented. Described printing and copying machinery works with pulsed colour lasers. All Geola machinery exists as working laboratory equipment and is used by us for continuous digital holograms printing. Image creation, hologram printing and copying processes can, and usually are, completely separated geographically. Colour reflection holograms usage as auto-stereoscopic projection displays for 3D gaming and home cinema applications is described, as well as digital holograms manufacture using mobile phone as a holographic imaging devise.
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10.5446/21836 (DOI)
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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Let me begin by adding my personal welcome to this eighth international symposium on display holography, and to give you my sincere regrets that I am not in Shenzhen with you. I would like to express my deepest thanks to TJ and Frank for honoring me with the title Honorary Chairman of the Meeting. My talk today will be mostly about my personal involvement with holography in the 1960s, a time that was certainly one of the most exciting periods in the development of holography. I'll focus on research carried out at Stanford for its this work that I know best. Let me begin my talk by recognizing the founders of our field, Dennis Gabor, who received the Nobel Prize for his invention of holography Emmett Leith and Eurus Upatinix, who modified Gabor's ideas to vastly improve holography. Leith received the US Medal of Science and Upatinix the Grand Medal of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and finally Yuri Denysyak, the inventor of reflection holography, who received the Lenin Prize for this work. The work I'll talk about today is certainly not of the same caliber as their work, but nonetheless I hope you'll find it interesting. Let me also pay tribute to the giants of the field of display holography, Lloyd Cross, the inventor of the multiplex hologram, and Stephen Benton, the inventor of the rainbow hologram. Examples of images from their holograms are also shown here. They've both had an enormous impact on the field of display holography. Next I'd like to show you a photo taken at a Stanford display holography meeting in the late 1960s. Albert Baez, an outstanding scientist and scientific diplomat shown in the center of this image, was asked by Encyclopedia Britannica to organize a small meeting at Stanford of people interested in holographic display to talk about the possibility of publishing a hologram in the Encyclopedia. At the left of this picture is Art Shallow, co-inventor of the laser and Nobel Prize winner. Next to him is his assistant who set up experiments for him. Unfortunately I've forgotten his name. Moving to the right you find my colleague, Matt Layman, who was responsible for much of the experimental holography work at Stanford in this time frame. To the right of Albert Baez is a much younger me. To the right of me is Hussain El-Sum, who made holograms as a graduate student in physics at Stanford in the 1950s. To the right of him is Ralph Worker, a co-inventor of pulsed holographic interferometry who worked at TRW in Los Angeles. Finally on the far right is Professor Paul Kirk Patrick of the physics department at Stanford, the co-inventor of the X-ray microscope together with Baez and the PhD supervisor of Baez, El-Sum and Worker. After our discussions we retired to Professor Kirk Patrick's home where we were served coffee and cookies by Joan Baez, the famous folk singer, the daughter of Albert Baez. After this general history I'd like to move on to describing some of our work in holography at Stanford in the 1960s. I'll first talk about the work we did in long distance holography. Then I'll turn to digital reconstruction of images from electronically detected holograms. And finally I'll speak about experiments in photon limited holography. First I consider long distance holography. The 1960s were in the midst of the Cold War and the US and the Soviet Union were each very nervous about the purposes of some of the satellites the other side was launching into space. It was highly desirable to obtain high resolution images of the others orbiting satellites and from those images determine what one could about the purpose of the spacecrafts. Unfortunately the resolution of images obtained from ground-based telescopes, the resolution was extremely poor due to distortions introduced by atmospheric turbulence near the ground. New methods for imaging through turbulence were of great interest. Here you see a picture of a Soviet Phobos satellite on the left and a typical image of a Soviet satellite obtained with a ground-based telescope shown on the right. In 1966 my colleagues and I realized that holography had a distinct advantage over conventional imaging when imaging through turbulence that is close to the entrance pupil of the imaging system. When a coherent reference beam and object beam suffer the same phase distortions on passing through a distorting medium such as atmospheric turbulence the fringe pattern recorded by a hologram is unaffected by the presence of distortions provided the reference and object are not too far apart. In retrospect we realized that this is simply a case of common path interferometry. The question then arose as to whether holography could be used to obtain high-resolution images of the unknown orbiting satellites. Many questions about applying this phenomenon to imaging orbiting objects occurred immediately. I should note that the US and the Soviet Union had signed a treaty pledging that neither side would illuminate the other satellites with lasers so these ideas would be relevant only if this treaty broke down. How would one obtain a reference wave? Could specular reflections from the object itself serve this purpose? Specular reflections were common in conventional images of such objects. Could holograms really be recorded over long distances? Were pulse ruby lasers sufficiently coherent? Could sufficient signal-to-noise ratio be achieved? How would the holograms be detected and the images reconstructed? These questions stimulated a series of research projects that we undertook. In 1968 and 1969 we performed a series of long-distance holography experiments at an observatory in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. The telescope had a primary mirror of 1.2 meter diameter and we attempted to image objects over a 12 kilometer horizontal path. Note that this is not the ideal path for holography for it works best when the atmospheric turbulence is primarily near the telescope. A Q-switched ruby laser located at the telescope was used for illumination of the distant objects. In these experiments the reference was supplied by a corner cube reflector next to the object so lensless Fourier transform holograms were recorded. In this slide a profile of the 12 kilometer path is shown and a diagram of the telescope optics. Note that the camera recording the hologram is focused on the primary mirror of the telescope. On the bottom left a scotch light bar target used as the object is shown and on the bottom right a typical hologram is shown. The interference fringes are quite clear. These images are of a different target in this case two corner cubes. The holographic image on the left is from a night of low atmospheric turbulence and the image on the right from a night of high atmospheric turbulence. On the night of good atmospheric seeing the two corner cubes are clearly resolved. Note the twin images which one expects in holography. You may not see much in this image but I see a lot. In this case the object was a uniform scotch light board used as background. In front of this board is my colleague Matt Lehmann 12 kilometers away with a pipe in his mouth. To help you see what I see I've sketched his head and pipe on the right. This particular experiment was performed over a shorter 1.9 kilometer path using a scotch light bar chart. On the left is the hologram. In the middle a reconstructed image from that hologram and on the right a conventional image of the same object. Object detail can be seen in the holographic image but not in the conventional image showing that under the right conditions there is an advantage to holographic imaging. Next I would like to turn to digital reconstruction of images from holograms work that we published in 1967. By way of background in 1966 Brown and Lehmann had published their first paper on computer generated holograms. In their work a mathematical object is assumed and a hologram of that object is computed and then plotted. The image of the mathematical object is then reconstructed optically. Our problem was in some sense the opposite. We wish to record a hologram optically on an electronic detector and then digitally reconstruct an image. Also in 1966 Enlo Murphy and Rubenstein of Bell Labs had electronically detected a hologram on a viticon then photographed a display of the hologram and reconstructed an image optically. We wish to dispense with optics in the reconstruction. We performed an experiment in which we detected an optical lensless Fourier transform hologram on a viticon as shown on the left of this slide and digitally reconstructed the image shown in the middle. An optically reconstructed image of the same object is shown on the right in the case of a hologram detected on film. Some comments on the experiment that I just described. The detector was a low quality viticon with the lens assembly removed. The coarse fringes seen arise due to second reflections from the glass plate cover on the viticon. As mentioned the hologram was of the lensless Fourier transform type. The object was a transparency of the letter P illuminated through a diffuser. The hologram was sampled in a 256 by 256 array which was twice the Nyquist rate. Now some comments on the calculated image. The FFT algorithm, the fast Fourier transform algorithm was first published by Kulian Tuki in 1965 and was used in these experiments. A PDP6 computer was used. The computation time for the image you see was 5 minutes and would have been 3 hours without the FFT algorithm. You see twin images as expected and you see speckle in the image as you might expect for a diffuse object. The two spots that are close to the optical axis arise from the second reflection fringe pattern mentioned earlier. It's interesting to compare our work in 1967 to what can be and is being done today. What took 5 minutes on a PDP6 computer in 1967 now takes less than 10 milliseconds on a desktop home computer. That's a gain of 30,000 from technology over just more than 40 years. In some current applications such as holographic and speckle interferometry, digital image formation is now the method of choice due to the fact that the data is electronic at the start. Digital reconstruction has also been used in soft X-ray holographic imaging as described in the reference shown. Here's an example of a commercial application of digital reconstruction from holograms. The microscope made by Linse Tech detects a hologram on a CCD array and reconstructs the image digitally, focusing digitally by changing the parameters of the reconstruction algorithm. Lastly, I'd like to discuss the noise performance of holographic detection as compared with conventional image detection. The work was done in 1968 with two graduate students, Richard Miles and Ralph Kimball. In unpublished work in the early 1950s, Gabor concluded that holography could be a more sensitive method of image detection than conventional focused image detection. He estimated that the advantage could be a factor of 10 in sensitivity. This advantage comes for very weak objects and requires the use of a very strong reference wave. When a strong reference wave interferes with a weak object wave, the detected information is in effect amplified by the reference wave, a phenomenon known as conversion gain in conventional heterodyne detection. As with heterodyne detection, holographic detection can approach the quantum limit of sensitivity for the detector used, whether it's film or an electronic detector. Experiments we performed in 1968 confirmed at least a tenfold advantage of holography in terms of the number of object photons required per object resolution cell. Our experiments were carried out on plus x film and the results were compared with conventional imaging. This slide shows experimental results for conventional focused images in the top row. Results for 9,000 photons, 4,500 photons, and 3,000 photons per object resolution cell are shown. It was found that 900 photons per resolution cell created an observable effect on the film negative, but the effect was too weak to reproduce in the journal publication. At the bottom we show a holographic image obtained with only 90 photons per object resolution cell copolarized with a reference wave. The coarsest bars can be seen quite easily. Hence, a tenfold improvement in sensitivity is a slightly conservative estimate of the gain. Finally, I want to mention that I have had the privilege during my career of working with 49 talented PhD students, about 20 of whom worked on problems related to holography and optical information processing. I've listed those 20 here, and I only want to point out a few that some of you might recognize. Jack Gaskell, University of Arizona, Alexander Saatchat, USC, James Fianna, University of Rochester, Raymond Kostak, University of Arizona. The two students who have received perhaps the highest positions are both women, indicated by the arrows and the photos. Ellen Ochoa on the bottom, Deputy Director of NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center, and a veteran of four space shuttle flights, approximately 1,000 hours in space. And Christina Johnson at the top, Dean of Engineering at Duke University, then Provost of Johns Hopkins University, and now Undersecretary of Energy in the Obama Administration. I'm very proud of all of my former students. By way of conclusions, the 1960s were without doubt the most exciting years of my career, due mainly to the advent of modern holography. Fundamental research problems in holography were to be found everywhere. At Stanford, we attacked a small subset of those problems, having a great deal of fun in the process. In closing, let me thank you all for listening to these historical reminiscences, which I hope you found interesting, even though they have little to do with display holography. Thank you.
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In the 1960’s, I was fortunate to participate in the renaissance in holography that was launched in the U.S. by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks. In this paper, I discuss some of our early activities in holography at Stanford. My discussion will cover the following subjects: Long distance holography (1966-69) – holography over a 12 km path; Digital reconstruction of holographic images (1967) – detection of a hologram on a vidicon and reconstruction of the image by computer; and Photon-limited holography (1968) – experiments verifying Gabor’s prediction tha,t under the right conditions, holography can be a more sensitive detection image method than conventional direct detection. These might be considered esoteric subjects, far from display holography. In at least one case, the work turned out to be important.
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10.5446/21837 (DOI)
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Hello everybody. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk today. My name is Karen Harvey and I'm from Harman Technology and the title of my talk is An Old Friend Rediscoverers Holography. During the talk, I'm going to explain who Harman Technology are ac mae'n gwybod i'r hollogrif i'r hollogrif yn ymddangos. Mae'r material yn ymddangos sylfa haelio, ac rwy'n gweithio'r hynny o sylfa haelio cystal yng nghylch, ac mae'n gweithio'r posibl sylfa haelio, ac mae'r problemau sy'n gweithio, sy'n gweithio'r cystal a'r cystal, ac mae'n gweithio'r cystal. Anwar heddiw hafnyddiaethiaeth? Renddi gymrygiad kram yn яwn gyda'r gyplodol a número 5 y byddiesnos 5 o 5 Hangidor, reporter Em ohong y形 that un i Majdorod, ac utilise cael eu cyfrannu annoying o hyn yn eu tîm USA. Mae hyn yn ymddangos y hwn o eich cy salsa cy bru, gweld meditation tunnu portraits a placied y pi BC Mae'r 125 ysgol yma, ymwneud ymwneud, a'r cyfnodd ymwneud yn cyfnodd sylfa halei'r technol. Ond oherwydd mae'r newid ymwneud, mae'r cyfnodd, ac mae'r cyfnodd, ac mae'r cyfnodd, mae'r newid ymwneud yn gweithio'r cyfnodd. Mae einch Naturallyn Fanghraedd Kroughtesc. Ac o ran Gunnedrweigoh yr banaeth am hyn he 메� 1983, mae'n sain banywch am fydd cwrnodd ynddo i yw cynnwys mogg moddent syr e Five Cyfreld. Rwyfyn wedi begyl quêi a fyddwch yn gweithio, a dyda gysyllt tham dim, spell ychydig sy'n ddau chi's datb, a'r ydych chi'n he fle Dw ibu ddu i ni fel dyna eich fy empath ynghorffrwch yn lleofei,yn efallai mem wrth iawn budd i chi, ac yn ei ffordd yw'r llwyth friten arall sicrhau eich cas cells mewn heddiw i. Rwyf wedi bod ll�시att i raghion ni nhub i unclearianro, ond drwy'r gyflwydo iawn am fwy increase i gael y onion gwy 다니w Kindbi'r threumide ocrewAm mewn sefydluoxeittenio wedi chi mewn ein tred i gael unig i kynyn hynny bryd drunk, gyda'i yn trafnol y caseys i ddylch hauntedig i'r caseys i gael lwyter ac yn ôl werthfododd ar dyfodiblegoededo ranno. Mae'r primóffickii Byr anneiddymaeth ف ki yn y 180, the fact that Peter Arsdown happened to make a leisiad am torni oedol yn ysbyg digon. Paddyfyn lle Seemsam peddoredd yn yr hyn. Jw u'r bobl yn hynng yn llunio, y ciudadw o'r hollwch ond yn erioed wedi ochr bod yn iawnUS ar hyn o reflectedant ar iechyd, ac yn beganio sydd y gallwn place wedi gerfod y viadau gyfaneth gweinig sydd yn ygwyngfa chi phaillmom a crechLaughsactive crossbarth gyda't er y тор mewn ffaitha Comunter Yn Gweinwyr i drofnod wahanol, gwreiddo'nwaysys O wych gweithio, a weithio ni fe allai llamechadoi neu callant. Mae fe allaiべibl, Beth ydych chi ei ddim yn falo fascy fer eu gwn. Mae Trewyddon, complexa, brifydd yn awturdod, maith arall. Nid bywod y commitment지dyn nhw am maheoda. Belyd안 y Gwyrdd yn gynhau, y cymryd AMG. Dasgareddion o dreferau yn ffotoeddiad. MA fradwch achosion, mae cy份 y gel'r hwn oed ar ddis �じ o hyd am y ffordd hereiloed derbyn oedd wedi keptio gwahanol ac mae'r ddis. Mae'n ystod yn ty 준비 â cijach dt bron'r ffordd hereiloed. Diolch ar standingdangol hefyd â% govern am ei behysiad,... Mae wedi helou sy'n cael ei dweud...? Pwy wneud hynny'r hanes iddyn nhw dwi'n cartffag...... Mae'r uddiwedd unigio i allaf beth yw'n endech nesche llawer teulu ar sicrau gyfoes Catrwchenau Ar ôl deiyd ar gyfer bugiad yn siaradau amerucolion, wrth hyn, i wneudذا chi yw medd BONC IV...acts stre massu 보는 y sp embracing o hollograffig, prolograffig plau i'r ffwrdd ac o hollograffig fel angen i ddweud. A dyma'n gwybod eu bod ni'n ddweud i'r newid o hollograffig o hollograffig o remeging. Iывают ag erbwys wydd gwybod yw'r esmerth Demes bidyg sydd mor d WRM a yardg disappointedog dy'r trefiadau llent, ac dyma rhwng y to wedi'u lög wagonnyddwyr yn sylfredd Galaxyos. A dyma rwy'n cymdeithas. Rydw'n te collaiddio roi gwech Casig honnych sa acceleration o gofö w왔 anys car æth ei ddosinerd o casig ac yn ymgyrchwun cyfnodol. Felly, rwy'n dechrau'r cyfnodol, y ffynol, y ffynol a'r ffunctiol yn y cystafol. Rwy'n dechrau, mae'n ddweud, yma 30 yma, sy'n ddweud y ffyrdd traddwl, y ffyrdd polydysgwyr, o'r ffyrdd cyfnodol, o'r ffyrdd cyfnodol. Mae'n ddweud y ffyrdd cyfnodol, ac mae'n ddweud y ffyrdd cyfnodol, ac mae'n ddweud y ffyrdd cyfnodol o'r ffyrdd cyfnodol, oedd yn diwylliant i weld yma, ac mae'n rhan i'r ffyrdd cyfnodol o'r ffyrdd cyffinodol, oherwydd yma yw'r ffyrdd cyffinodol. Felly, rydyn ni wedi gwneud y ffyrdd cyfnodol, neu i ddim yn ddweud ar y cyfnodol o'r ffyrdd cyfnodol, i gael y ffyrdd cyflwyneu oherwydd, ac mae'n ddweud yw'r ffyrdd cyffinodol, ac mae'n ddweud yr eich ffyrdd cyffinodol, Yna yw'n gwyiystanio oherwydd oeddwn ni'n golygu more oír bwerio cynha cha huggingio, ac ymaidd i am boblem i thwynd ar dylunio'r model gofeithio nifer gais trung. Eklares y flwyddyn ni wedi bod writersu hoffod yma yna y pwyllt trace cheftngwyr, y peu uned forearm i lawrhy incoming i dressrall i jotれ i lapau hopeless didd molecule Efallai i sioss iawn y cystferau. ac mae'n mater gen nhw i ni,ти o blynyhych yn rhoi farchilyfa yng Nghaerlllwytaeth bywydrwyng da not yn holl ar y lle? I mo mineral yn fl Bonell Ynámtengymru sig跃 o'ch dentrihedus gyda no i ni'r hiwn i chi'r mynegu fark We have actually grown what we thought we had. How do we know that we have them when we have mixed it all together? We just ended up with a crystal that looks very nice but is actually just a homogenous mixture of all three chloride bromide and iodide. So what we did was we actually did some analytical work to actually look at the crystals and these are two scans from some analytical technique called high resolution second iron mass spectrometry Maenwn y spectra mor mae o'Masell ousi o hig wahanol yng nghymffinn mae ym Mhen comprisedd crowded theaters. Mae partîio ar fy mod cyfodd cast is raffodd y mientras, mae e physicalmddwys politics ond ensawr cancellation pele finance Mae ahwyd amdano yn hyn Cerdydra mae muy fodlon cy Runner Cymraeg ddanyl yr ard datblygaid. Gwrtho Gwoed droswydall prynydol, lying-fynologiantr unfol. Ddydd yn ddau rhoi'riddori o'rahn mewn storidd, gy gap儿 a newyddwr. Mae'n ddelt o'r accident tro ac fan y rhai pan cryfiat. Mae'n edrych yn caig o'r iawn nifer a wnaeth ym hjälith o godgar, cefnod i'r ffalaeth. Gweithio'r tblif歡 sut o bwymiau'n gydag han l roughu'r gwuaith codesch ac yn ei gydag Felly, washer gownod amddol wedi netwyd ar gyfer y cyst seniwch cyfr체 buffon i gorfod y chymwyr, mae'n ardal yn dda. Mae'n dweud hiera, mae eich defer yn ein dimensiwnol, ma' ymgyrch oリa sicrhauwyr o l Sewyd i'w merch y mae anfaad cyfryنت.townorwy mynd ac mae linell cael gysylltiPL in gyda reine ann ti arna dorod a chyfnodydd yn fydde, irrationalus Unwyr fel hely 맛있는 arbvent Bryce mental sy'n cynnwys 不 hwn o lefbadu cryste street idyl iawn fydd manllewy rfon o roesi traditions greigus yn hyn yn y cydech plentom COVID sefydlu i ddulech yn Cymru yn yrğiniadnau targi. mae'r cyfnog ddeallu dwyddion yn I-Wire-Dyr yw'r sefydliad, jeithio'r gwybod, y teau ydyn nhw,'r deimloed ac'r Ingred已-waith eidych er agos bryddoch ac fy moddyl ryw bry Cur��면 hei vouwch gyfrifiadau wrth fanna afael 400 o a ddwy'r cystall yn ymddiadol, ac mae'n mynd i'n ddwy'r cystall yn ymddiadol, oherwydd ydych chi'n gwneud cystall yn 30-60 nm. A ydych chi'n gwybod, mae'n gwybod gyntaf o'r cystall ymddiadol, mae'n gwybod yn ymddiadol yn 5, 10, 15 nm, ac mae'n gwybod yn ymddiadol yn ymddiadol. Yn ymddiadol, mae'n gwybod yn ddwy'r cystall yn ymddiadol, subscribers ar ei hunan Nedd. Na hwnna ar hyn am y позволau yn ymddiadol i'ch fo likeluegau o afternoon, yniterthynnol o gwybod yn 50% merfl cans o Ein Ff tiempo. Felly mae like� huit a'u gallu yn ddwy'r cystall. Mi finde ac yn hunan y chemicals, ond mwy yn gloriousig siō. Fy apparentneg ar gyllyd Williamirsinf gerçektenied o'r gwbl ymddindeb gyda Maurent Nesaf, ac mae'r cyllidiedol yr ysgol i fy huncio, HB5+, oedd y boxau ymwg, yn ystod yn ystod yn ystod yn y cyfnod ar y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod ar y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod ar y boxau yn ystod yn y cyfnod. Yn y gallwn y pwysig o'r modd ymwg yn y plant, yn y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod, yn y cyfnod. Yn y cyfnod, yna'n ddweud i'r problemau. Dyna'n gyffredin gy sendwyr yw ayna. Ac nad angen yn fiar neu dwi'n gwybod hyn i'w cysylltueyedd o'r 5-10 pwysig gwlad dri. Y cyfnod bats yn siŵm y marwię y上 wedi cabby νesaf eich y targywydd hi grannolión hwn o'r pryd o'r oly Arcyddin yn ddau, ond gyda was competitive heatsuring y ll откential sy蒙 mi symud a gynnig lod ynallwydd yr o druk yw byddwn Starkhaf a dewisio gyda pryd o roddau hyd yn ticksadol beth dedwysg wrth mélgefydd o i modd gennym, subjects cardog, phethafpo'r ll om單 sucksia, a byddwn sdoedd brydno algo mewn bach o clesynn, hefyd a chanel a gynhylltenu'r L וgeriwch Himmel yn fewn y cšeaffan, dw am unrhyw recognise hwnnw, fel cy apology ch 있어. Rŷ myndónau annригwscol. Mae hyn sy'n lleol iawn mewn gwiaith shrim... ond rai'r brcynser yn cael ei'r someday yn 象 Подgylir yindingll Gredinig, ydw i'r holoродd arddang ac neur allafewa genes ei wneud irian gael Gredinig i gyd-igaill. Wrth fy<|ka|> yma shade'ch hunain combined syniadlekol maen nhwril Ayamai. Thosei fan le ni haru syniad Chrникаxol White matewynfa. Warn y gallwn i 5 f apprentices i 10, 50, etc Mae gennym hi, roi fluniau.ож 15 nanomethes. Not as easy as you might think. The other one is how do you handle a motion when you're making it on a one ton scale or 100 to 1000 litre scale rather than a small scale? And also the gelatin, that's quite an important factor that I'll just touch upon briefly, how that can have a major importance. Just to start off, I just want to make sure, when we talk about a silver halide emulsion, it says actually silver halide crystals in gelatin. They don't come on there in gelatin and they're bound in that gelatin and it's an integral part. And some of the actual gelatin is actually bound to the crystals themselves, it forms like a shell. And for large crystals that shell is quite a small proportion of the overall total. But as crystals get smaller, that shell becomes a much larger proportion. If you think that when you grow, if you think of a coconut for instance and you've got the husk and the shell around the outside, it's quite a small proportion of the overall coconut. If you then transferred that same thickness of husk and hers onto a monkey nut or a peanut, you've got a much thicker larger proportion of your actual nut is actually now the shell. And that has quite significant properties as I'll show you later for the silver halide crystals. What I want to do first is talk about sizing. I'll compare some of the sizes and I'll discuss some of the problems that we actually have when we're trying to size silver halide crystals. Does that show up at all? The top three are what I will call direct measurement techniques. So they're techniques that we use that we can directly measure the size of the crystals. And that they're techniques that are very useful to us. Unfortunately, the cool to multi-sizer, which is quite a cheap technique, is not any use for holographic emulsions because it only goes down to 400 nanometres, relatively 20-30 nanometres that we require. So the cheap option isn't available to us. The TEM and SEM, that's the Transmission Electron Microscope and Scanning Electron Microscopy are quite expensive techniques, but they do measure the crystal size directly. The other problem they have is that because they're a pictorial measurement, you're only measuring about a few thousand crystals, 100 to 1000 crystals at a time. So the statistics are quite small. The bottom three techniques are techniques that aren't direct measurement. They need the operator to actually input some data, take some derived data and input it into the calculations and that gives us the overall size. And that leads to some quite tricky problems that we have to overcome. I just want to very quickly, if you just don't take too much notice of the graphs, just try and understand the, think about the overall size. This is a technique called disk centrifugation and this technique is dependent upon the density of the crystals and you plug in the density of your crystals and it gives you a nice plot on what things the size is. And here it's told us the size is about 30 nanometres, which seems really good. But you then start to think, well what is the actual density of the silver halide with its gelatin coating? What is that actual density? How thick is the gelatin coating? Do I know how thick it is? Because that will obviously vary. The next slide, if I just take a minute to explain this, I have said if the thickness of your gelatin layer varies, the overall density will vary. If you have no silver halide in the emulsion and you just have a gelatin solution, the density is approximately 1 and that is on the y axis, I'm looking at density there. If at the other extreme you have no gelatin and you just grow a single crystal of silver bromide in this example, your density is about 6 and obviously then, depending on, you then vary the level between 0% gelatin and 100% gelatin, your density then changes from 6 down to 1. And depending then on the thickness of your gelatin layer round the crystal, you can then get a different decision on the size of your crystal depending on that. And your x axis here is showing at the bottom, is showing the actual size of the crystals that we measure. If you just remember that the number one, this is a log scale so one is 10 nanometres, two is 100 nanometres, three is 1000 nanometres. And as you can see here that we've gone, as we go change the amount of gelatin or the thickness of that gelatin layer at 10 nanometres, we get a very different effective density. And so you can get a very different size just by putting in a different density. And that's quite an important problem that we face, what density do we put in. And this is a similar thing with all the other techniques that we have to make some assumptions and those assumptions aren't always clear what we should put in there. So I then said that direct measurements are the most valuable to us. And here I've got a picture of an SEM, so that's a scanning electron microscope that we actually have in house measuring a real holographic emotion. And it's showing that the average particle size in this one is between 30 to 100 nanometres. This is one of our earlier motions that we grew and you can see that it's reasonably, most of the crystals are reasonably all the same size, but some of them are slightly larger and that's a 30 to 100 nanometre crystal. This is a TEM and this is probably the most sensitive technique. The SEM we have in house will only really measure down to about 30 nanometres as we won't get any lower. The TEM which we don't have, we have to outsource it, is a lot more expensive, but it will get down to 5, 10 nanometres and so it's really the only technique we have available for really small crystals. And as you can see here it's actually only looking directly at the silver halide. It doesn't actually measure the gelatin layer around it either. So here again, a reasonably good, narrow size distribution of particles. Okay, we want to grow, we've now sorted out how to solve the problem of sizing and we think we know how to grow them, but there's a lot of emulsion handling problems that we have when we're looking at a ton scale. How do we scale up from growing in the lab, which is maybe a few hundred litres, right up to the ton scale, which is what we typically grow in our emulsion plant. Specifically, as the crystals get smaller and smaller, the emulsion starts to behave very differently from a photographic emulsion. We've found that there's very subtle viscosity changes, pH changes, that have quite different effects on the overall properties of the emulsion. We also have problems that with small crystals we really need to make sure we control the temperature. If you let the temperature get any higher, it rocks start to appear and they're the killer for scatter. So as you want to go blue light, you don't want any large crystals because they will just make the emulsion scatter. And if you think you're trying to cool or heat a one ton vessel, it takes quite a long time to cool it down. It's not the easiest of things to do. Whereas at a 100 litre level, or 100 ml level, we can do it quite quickly. We just put it in a bucket of ice and it cools down quite quickly. So the cost implications for trying to make a small crystal aren't insubstantial. And there's quite a lot of work that needs to be done just to say, well, how do we, what factors do we need to consider? The other factors are, as I say, pH and viscosity. Viscosity has quite a distance as we try to coat the emulsion. If it's going to have different viscosity properties, we need to understand those and understand how they will affect us when we coat on our plate machine or on our film machine. Coming back to the talking about the gel. As I said, each crystal has a gelatin layer around it. For large crystals, they have a layer of gelatin around it, but they also have quite a lot of space in between. They can, where they're packed, you can get quite a lot of distance between the crystals. If you think of a very small crystal, you have very little space, they want to pack really close together. And that has quite significant effects because most of the gelatin is actually bound to the crystals. So we need to think about what we can do to that to get them made even better. The other things we need to understand are the surface area of small crystals is much, much higher. And therefore, when we try to put dyes on to make them either blue sensitive, red sensitive or green sensitive, we need a lot more dye on those crystals to get the sensitivity up. And yet at the same time, we don't want dye stain at the end of the product, so we don't want dye there ruining the plates when you've actually made your holograms. And that's another important consideration we need to think about. So summing up, basically Harman, I've spent a lot of time and we're now in a position to actually launch our new brand of red and green sensitive plates and then film. And we're doing a lot of work on that. But we're also now working to look, that's our first step, how do we go to make smaller and smaller crystals and start to make the motions on a smaller scale or on a smaller size, but still on a large scale. Because for all food, sorry Harman, I must get used to calling us by our right name, Harman, we need to be able to have a reasonably large volume product to make it worth our while, which is why we've been driven by the industrial applications because that's where we see the major users of photographic or holographic film. And it's the reason we're able to then offer products to yourselves is because that market is available again. So we're well placed to manufacture silver halide material because we have all the expertise from the Elford days and we have all the capacity necessary. Elford, Harman, have made it a stated commitment to stay in silver halide and they want to be the best in silver halide technology. So there's a commitment there to silver halide technology. As I said, we're now collaborating with a number of other companies on a number of different projects and we're also collaborating with Demontford University on the UK grant, a project called the NAHO project. We're also working with Hans at Optic, we've done work with those as well to look at our emotions and our summary. To summarise, or to basically though, we wouldn't, we'd like to acknowledge both Martin, Hans and Steve who without their efforts and their help we wouldn't be where we are today. Harman have the emotion making facilities and the coating facilities but what we no longer have at the same level as we did in the 80s is the testing facilities and without Hans and Martin and Steve we wouldn't be able to, we wouldn't know whether our products were of any use or not. So they've done a fantastic job for us and their help is very much appreciated. So there are the contact details, basically of Harman, if you want to get in touch please do and please let Harman know that you're interested and they can then register that level of interest and they'll then know who to contact, they'll take your name and be able to put you on a database and then keep you up to date with what is happening. I'd also like to now ask Steve to come up and just show you some of the work we've been doing on the NEHO project and then I'll ask for some questions and also in the exhibition there's a picture that Hans has very kindly made for us on our material and there's also some material that Tim Lawtason has made for us as well who's been done, sorry I forgot your Tim, he's also done some more testing for us and those pictures are all in the art forum at the moment. So I'm going to go ahead and show you some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some of the work that we've done on the NEHO project and then I'll ask Steve to come up and share some but sicrhau nesθwys'n meddim ta dim gael pryd ba�истwn gonebwyd arno i ei wahanol fewn gwbl 2021 iiau iurioír 이것ildeu a'i rannos Sadinol er mwyn sgodaeth ar yr arian cyd === Mae'r TEM yn ystod o'r sylfa haelio'r ysgolf. Mae'r SEM a'r ddweud o'r teimlo'r ddweud yn ymgyrchol. Mae'r TEM yn ymgyrchol sy'n meddwl, ac mae'n meddwl i'r teimlo'r ddweud, mae'n meddwl i'r jeilio. Mae'r teimlo'r ddweud yn meddwl i'r jeilio'r ddweud. Mae'r TEM yn ystod o'r sylfa haelio'r ysgolf. Rwy'n meddwl i'r teimlo'r ddweud. Mae'n meddwl i'r teimlo'r ddweud, ac yn ymgyrchol, mae'n meddwl i'r teimlo'r ddweud. Yn ymgyrchol, mae'n meddwl i'r teimlo'r ddweud, oherwydd i'r rhagor pEMP, oherwydd y maen nhw'n gweithio'r dyfu yma am un o y jaethlógiad Maskra, Nghaith ddweud am Cabinet oedd yn fflcross moddau ond a ddsiguiathere, ac mae hyn o gefn o'r reilio'r ddafyn布 o'r recollio i weld ychydig pwysydd, circle. Creo da Union70 coachesref? founder of EAG sponsor team? Lee. Al Mhlyn, IF, roedd y syniadul yn cyllaf y cwn besig wedi gwybod a oedd yn抱 cyr Fel Mhly applic Canadian pan yn 100 a 100 meter mae'n mynd i oedd y gweéliannwch gyntaf o 200 moed a 100 o'r holl fuell ail. maenwch yr un masd Llyfrunaeth o'r haf ymdd女 corth, mae gennym yn � melodor fe wlaffio 200 o dxudaethキwdd rhai. Both ewch roedden o'n odd mae'n oed Bryllem yn ei fanu. fe wnaeth y marching, dwi flavored y mediumwyd wedi'i gwhornosiaidru ffair-dweud! Christl iddyn ni'n law partnerau eich bod yn da o cael perfiadau cyntaf gan sidedrewn mae'r Cafodd Cymru, y canedd charges o'r fynd iawn. Rこれでni 我 float-toy lwyd muk WA n型 ddeag idio am efo2020 conversael a jam o utraddiad y gall border tw convinced – cleaning people go on. Well thank you once again for listen to me an onthogi will have something for you Edwards "'twーん hanifiallwc y meditation ag y ann sydd yn dyet repectrach yn eithanusterion a trwm o gwbl y mar�로 iawn.'
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This talk will introduce HARMAN technology Ltd (formerly the silver halide manufacturing division of ILFORD Ltd) to the holographic community and launch its range of holographic products. In detail it will give an historical overview of our involvement in holography, recent results, the current applications of our technology, details of the science behind the product, and look ahead at the future for Holography at HARMAN. Ilford began manufacturing holographic products in the 1970’s with major development work in the mid 1980’s launching a range of plates, film and chemistry. This was discontinued in 1991 due to lack of demand. Recent enquires asking if we would consider producing material again has started up our involvement and now work with several clients on a number of different applications. The science and technology behind the large-scale production of silver halide based holographic material has changed since its inception at ILFORD in the 1970’s. I will show images of the recent silver halide crystals grown by HARMAN and explain some of the difficulties around obtaining an accurate determination of their size. Looking forward, HARMAN are working with Professor Richardson from DeMontfort University England and Havels Sylvania lighting to produce edge lit lighting devices for use in buildings to increase the efficiency of flat screen lights and hence enable a significant reduction in energy use.
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10.5446/21839 (DOI)
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Okay, it's my honor and honor pleased to be here to give a presentation on the color holographic display based on single layer molecule-medicine and pangor-medicine DCG material. I'm Jianhua from the State University of China. In this paper I will talk about two parts. One is a wide range color adjustment of monochromatic MPE DCG reflection holograms. I will introduce the preparation and recording and reconstruction geometry and then some experiment on the color adjustment experiment. The second part is color holographic based on single layer pangor-medicine DCG. We will introduce new pangor-medicine DCG material and give some experiment on the spectral response curve, its photo sensitivity and give some picture images of the color reflection holograms. Now the pangor-medicine self-helied and photopolymer material is available for the color holographic. Although DCG is a good volume, phase type holographic material, it has high diffraction efficiency, higher spatial resolution, higher single-loyce ratio, but research results of color holographic based on DCG are still very limited. Much work focused on the monochromatic red sensitive and green sensitive material. In this paper we will summarize our recent results of color holographic display based on monochromatic and pangor-medic DCG. For the monochromatic red sensitive DCG, we develop a new color adjustment technology and then we report our high quality pangor-medic DCG material for the recording of color reflection holograms. Currently the first part, wide range color adjustment of MBDCG reflection holograms. Currently reported wavelength adjustment includes the change of the concentration of sensitizer, hardness of gelatine layer, effective exposure and processing temperature. We can introduce additional post-baking and additional post-processing proceeding to adjust the color, the playback wavelength. A usual method is using tri-ethronomine as pre-swearing reagent. This method has shortcomings such as usually they require complicated processing proceedings or lack repeatability and stabilization and they cannot achieve uniform color. Furthermore, these methods also have limited adjustable wavelength range, typically several to several times of microbes. Our motivation is to develop a more reliable color adjustment method. It has a wide wavelength adjustment range and we can achieve quantitative and linear adjustment. So the processing procedure is also simple as conventional DCG material. The strategies we introduced are acrylonomide, a water-soluble organic reagent with lower molecular weight into the photosensitive layer during the preparation of the material. It has good film-forming capacity, good optical transparency and also it's comparable with other chemical reagents in MBDCG. Furthermore, the wavelength adjustment amount is linearly proportional to the concentration of the acrylonomide. During the preparation of the material, the acrylonomide is added as a wavelength adjustment with various concentrations. The post-processing procedure is similar to other conventional MBDCG hologram. Here is a recording and reconstruction geometry. It's well known that the period or the interval of the plane of the interference range are parallel to the surface of the material and the period lambda is proportional to the recording wavelength. After the recording of the hologram, then during development acrylonomide will be dissolved completely into the world. It will lead to the uniform shrink of the interference plane throughout the volume. Then the interval of interference planes will change from lambda to a smaller value. Then the playback wavelength which satisfies the black condition will be proportional to the smaller value lambda. Okay. Here I give some pictures of the colored adjustment. The picture A is the spectral selectivity curve without adding the acrylonomide. Its playback wavelength is very close to the recording material. Very similar to the recording wavelength. When we are using 10 milligram per millimeter to the photosensitive layer, after development we can have the playback wavelength is 5 to 4 nanometer. So the playback wavelength shifts to short wavelength about 108 nanometer. Also the higher diffraction efficiency and the narrow bandwidth are maintained. This picture gives a relation between the concentration of acrylonomide and the adjustment amount of playback wavelength. From this picture we can that adjustment amount really exhibits a linear relationship with acrylonomide concentration. And the total wavelength adjustment range is up to 200 microns. If we use the recording wavelength of 633 nanometer, then the playback wavelength can be adjusted widely from red to green to blue, almost covering all visible spectral range. Here I give some images of the adjustment, color adjustment. This is the first picture is the exceptional red color. Then with various concentration of acrylonomide we can achieve green and blue and other colors. Also you can see all holograms have higher color saturation and diffraction, also have lower noise. The second part is I would like to talk about our single layer panchromatic DCG material. In this sector way by introducing new multi-color photo sensitizer and efficient photochemical promoters we successfully develop a high quality panchromatic DCG. This is a receipt of our panchromatic gel team material. It uses French gel team as polymer biode and meso glow as red sensitizer. We use Rodamine 6G as glow green sensitizer. Potential glow made as cross-linked and tetral meso glow as inactual donor. This chemical reagent as I know is first proposed by Professor Jeff. This is a spectral response curve of our single layer panchromatic DCG. The best is the monochromatic red sensitive gel team. The solid curve is our panchromatic gel team. It has stronger absorption band within red, green and blue regions so it should propose the recording of color holographic. This picture shows the photo sensitive activity of our single layer panchromatic DCG. The recording web bands we have 400 or 42 from Higgs and other from Akker and Hino Neon. So we have four laser lines and for obtaining diffraction efficiency of over 18 percent the required exposure is only about 20 to 30 mini joule per square centimeter. So it's photo sensitive. It's significantly higher than other red sensitive or blue sensitive DCG material. Okay this is conventional single beam Danny Shooker optical configuration for the recording of color reflection holographic. We use RGB recording web bands from Hino and other iron lasers. Okay this picture shows the spectral selective curves of single line RGB reflection holographic. The thickness of the sensitive layer is about 18 micro. The exposure for it here and the same central playback web bands is very close to the original recording laser web bands which guarantees a good color reconstruction and saturation. Okay here I give the image of the wide line illuminated leafman color holograms. So the object is ceramic mask of Beijing Opera. So you can this picture have a higher brightness and a good synchronized ratio. Also the good color saturation. Okay in conclusion. This paper we develop a new color adjustment technique called it's facial includes wide range linear adjustment and also within the playback web bands can be shipped within the whole baseball range. Then we develop a single layer panchromatic gelatine. It has a higher diffraction efficiency, higher special resolution, higher photo sensitivity and also the hologram has higher color saturation and synchronized ratio. Okay we believe that the research work presented in this paper will have practical application in color holographic display and also holographic optical elements. Thank you.
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Three-dimensional color holographic display has important applications in visual representation of artworks, industrial products, museum items, medical images, etc., and has been always a long and diligent research goal for holographers and researchers. Through Slavich fine-grain silver-halide emulsion and Du Pont photopolymers have been successfully developed for color hologram recording, the research results of color holography based on dichromated gelatin material are still very limited. In this paper, we will summarize our recent results of color holographic display based on single-layer monochromatic and panchromatic dichromated gelatin materials. Firstly, based on the red sensitive methylene-blue sensitized DCG material, a new method is developed for the wide-range quantitative adjustment of the playback wavelength of Lippmann holograms. The main feature of this technique is homogenuously introducing a water-soluble organic reagent acrylamide into photosensitive layer as preswelling reagent and wavelegth adjuster, during the exposure process acrylamide will not react with other active reagents in DCG layer, but it will completely dissolve into water during the development process, this will result in an uniform shrink throughout the thickness of the photosensitive layer, and lead to the image reconstructed at shorter wavelength after the conventional dehydration process in isopropyl alcohol.
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10.5446/21841 (DOI)
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Good afternoon everyone. I am BC from Guangzhou. My supervisor is He Zhou Wang from Shunyesen University. My talk is computer-generated fresh air hologram fabrication for true life things three-dimensional display. Just now someone asked a question about the hollow TV done, finished by Dr. Fan. Whether it is a hologram, my talk will talk about this question. Part one is the background. Nowadays a lot of interested has focused on three-dimensional displays, a lot of techniques, all techniques such as lenticular lens, parallelized barrier, and as we all think that holography is the perfect technique for three-dimensional display. But however, it is one question to capture true life three-dimensional thing for traditional optical setup. The main reason is the shortage of the coherent lens from laser. In this paper, we propose a technique we call the computer-generated fresh air hologram CGFH for displaying true life thing. Firstly, we do some theoretical job. So we set up, this is the three-dimensional thing. At this plan, we set up a special line modulator. At this plan, we set a holography plate to record every perspective of the three-dimensional thing. The distance by the distance between the special line modulator and the holography plant. We set up three coordinate systems to describe the position. For this three-dimensional object, we set up a three-dimensional coordinate system, the XYZ. At this special line modulator plan, we set up XP, YP, two-dimensional coordinate system to describe the image. At this holography plate, we set up UV for this pinhole mask. When UV describes the position of pinhole mask, this pinhole mask adhere to holography plate. According to Ray-Chasing Projection Geometric, we can get these easy equations. We use these equations to do algorithm in computer. Next, we suppose each objective point is an infinite decimal of emitter. Then the projection image that corresponds to this infinite decimal object point could be written as the following equation. Delta is the direct pulse function. All XYZ is the object point located at XYZ. All XYZ stands represent the intensity of this point. This is the equations calculated by this. Delta X, delta Y, delta Z stands by the infinite decimal object point. P, a single source point, XP, YP is the point at the position of XP, YP represents the intensity of the projection image. Then we record the holograph for this infinite decimal object point. We can get this equation, an introduction. This is the key transformation. To this equation, we find out that there is a term, d over EZ. We get a little d over EZ using this approximated condition that is d approximated to EZ. We can get the HUV single source point at the point of UV. Then the holograph for the whole tile object scene is written as the follow. This is very familiar to us. This is the Fresnel equations. It is very clear to say that it is equivalent to traditional Fresnel hologram that we did computer-generated Fresnel hologram. It is equivalent to the traditional Fresnel hologram of 3D object. That is why the computer-generated Fresnel hologram can record the depth of the 3D scene. We get this theoretical and analytical result that we say it is equivalent to Fresnel hologram. We did some experiments to verify our theory. We how to fabricate a computer-generated Fresnel hologram. First, we get 3D data of the 3D scenes, such as using laser scanner or something else. Then we encode 3D data, transform 3D data to the ray-chasing projection imagery. Then fabricate computer-generated Fresnel hologram by mesh-stocked holography-lister-graphy. This is our optical setup. The laser, bioparm solistee laser, single frequency, goes to the beam splitter and split two beams and goes to the lens and the spatial line modulator. This is the diffuser. At this, we get a pinhole mask adhered to the holography plate. The pinhole mask is mounted on the translation stage, which is motorized, and to control the position of the pinhole to match the ray-chasing projection image. In step B is the reconstruction optical setup. This shows different perspectives. We get different projection images. Actually, we got 100 times 100 perspective. When we get the computer-generated Fresnel hologram, this is the construction image. We focus with this trace, this trace, we got three traces of our three-dimensional scene. This king is the franchise, and the bai shi and the pong is at a bad position. We get the reconstruction. When we focus at the plan of these two traces, we can get these two traces clear and the franchise blurring. When we focus using a camera, focus at the plan of this trace, the king trace, and the two backchase is blurring. So, on focus, clear. Our focus blurring. We get the three-dimensional picture. The three-dimensional picture, computer-generated Fresnel hologram can recall the depth of the 3D scene. For true-life scene, we render the camera with the digital camera. We render using these two pictures. We render it using model-based reconstruction. We get the 3D data and we get the 3D image. We fabricate the computer-generated Fresnel hologram. This is the list construction video. There's a lot of spectra. The experiment result is not very good. The condition of the experiment is not very good. This is the perspective image made in software. We always done this in theory. It is proven that computer-generated Fresnel hologram is equivalent to the traditional Fresnel hologram. We set up an experiment to fabricate CGFH and the reconstruction shows a good depth of field. This way, we can fabricate CGFH to display true-life 3D scene. I want to thank our supervisor. This is our group website. I want to mention that this set up, Stephen Smith has done this very similar job several years ago. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Questions or comments? Thank you very much. I'm afraid how much the viewing angles, the projection views should you use? We didn't have exactly number, but about 15 degrees. What kind of hologram do you use? What kind of hologram? Transmission Fresnel hologram. Amplitude hologram or face hologram? Any more? Okay. Thank you.
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In this paper we use model-based 3D reconstruction to get the real life 3D scene information through the traditional photos. A novel approach called modified integral imaging is present. The 3D data is encoded to 2D data by the algorithm of integral imaging. The coded 2D information is stored on the holographic plate by matrix holographic lithography. The reconstruction scenes exhibit large depth-of-field and have wide viewing-angle. It’s easy to duplicate the 3D scene using regular equipment. There are many applications such as holographic packaging and 3D logo using this technology.
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10.5446/21844 (DOI)
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I will give you a very short report. The title of my paper is Digital Graphic Inquestion System based on liquid crystal special line modulator. They also come from National Taiwan Normal University and St. John's University. The honor of my talk includes a brief introduction, the working principle of full phase digital graphic encryption, further computer simulation, especially on key mask property, and then optical implementation using liquid crystal special line modulator as electrical first key mask. Finally, I will conclude my talk. This show you basic image encryption and decryption. For encryption, an input image is scrambled by a lock code to generate a render noise like encrypted image. As we all know, the encrypted image should be resistant again, attack, and noise for transmission or story of the crime. So the key code is the, in general, key code is the same as the lock code or conjugate version and have a larger dimension for high data security. For decryption, one can use and authorize the key code to open lock code and retrieve the primary image. So we consider the foreign reason of the image encryption using digital graphic. First, the digital graphic can recall the complex field of encrypted image. Second, the key mask can be designed and processed by special line modulator and the digital computer for potential applications. This figure shows the working principle of the proposal full phase digital or graphic encryption. In this figure, we have the object arm and the reference arm. In the object arm, the input, face-encoded image and joined to the face-key mask. The result, the finial defection is obtained in the Hogan plant. In the reference arm, another face-key mask is inserted to scramble the data. In the Hogan plant, face-shifter can realize the face-shifting algorithm to remove DC and the trained image. In the Hogan plant, we can use a CCD to capture a series of the holography in the reference pattern. So we can perform the encryption with double key masks, both in the object arm and the reference arm. For the one need numerical calculation for decryption, you have to recover, first you have to recover the key mask from key hologram in the reference and the object arm and then run inverse finial transform for waveform reconstruction. Now I show you the encryption procedures. Left is the optical cell, right is the flow chart. In the object arm, we present the face-end code input image and the face-key mask as shown here. In the reference arm, we present another random face-key mask and perform the four-step face-shifting algorithm. CCD is used in Hogan plant to recall a series of the face-shifting digital hologram to synthesize encrypted digital hologram by algebra calculation. The encrypted digital hologram can be written in these equations, which Ae is the encrypted amplitude, phi e is the encrypted phase. Now I will describe how to make key hologram. For making key hologram, for making key hologram in the reference arm, we have to remove the input image and the key mask in the object arm and put a key mask in the reference arm to make and synthesize the key hologram while the face-shifting digital hologram process. Then we continue to make key hologram in the object arm. For making key hologram in the object arm, one have to keep key hologram in the object arm alone to make and synthesize the key hologram while the same digital hologram process. Also one can retrieval the key mask from the transfer from the key mask for decryption. Now I described the decryption procedure. One can run decryption using numerical calculation of preceding digital hologram. I have to apply the key hologram in the reference arm to open the encrypted hologram, which the encrypted hologram amplitude is divided by the key hologram amplitude. The encrypted hologram phase is substituted by key hologram phase. After running e-verse-final transform, one have to present a conjugate face mask in the object arm to decrypt the secure image data. So the decrypt image can also face encoded into an empty image by decryption. Let me show you some of computer simulation results of the encryption and decryption. A is the image to be encrypted. B is the encrypted hologram. Left is the amplitude hologram. Right is the face components. You can see it is very random. So one cannot guess or recognize any primary image without the use of the key mask. C is the key mask in the reference arm. D is the key mask in the object arm. Figure e to h is the decryption result with or without the key mask. E is the case of the no key mask presented. F is the key mask presented only in the reference arm. G is the key mask presented only in the object arm. H is the decrypted image by correct double key mask. You can see the primary image can be comprehensively covered. Then we consider the key mask properties. In general, we can use normalized RU min square N, R, M, S ensure errors between the primary image and the decrypted image as defined in the equations to evaluate decryption performance. So we can evaluate the decryption performance. We can study the key mask property for decryption. We consider the firing case, case one. We consider the pixel loss of the key mask both in the object and the reference arm. The result in the result is shown that the horizontal is the pixel loss. The vertical is the N, R, M, S errors. The circle indicates the pixel loss of the key mask in the reference arm. The triangle indicates the pixel loss of the key mask in the object arm. You can see the decryption error will raise as the pixel loss increase. It also implies that the key mask in the reference arm is more sensitive to the pixel loss for decryption. We consider case two, shift torrents of the key mask. The horizontal is the key mask shift in the Z-axis. Vertical is also the decryption error. You can see the key mask should be accurate position by retrieval, for retrieval and in effect shift greater than 0.3% in Z-axis will cause entirely failure decryption. Now I describe the optical implementation using liquid crystal special line modulator LC-SOM in short as electric address key mask. We first consider the modulation property of LC-SOM. The photo shows a commercialized micro-display panel which consists of M by N pixel array. We know the LC cell is sandwiched by a pair of polarizer. The transmission and the shift of the LC cell can be written in these equations. We know the optical amplitude and the space of the transmitted light from LC cell might couple each other. From the equation we know that the transmission at the T and the gamma is the function of the orientation of the polarization pair that is the theta A and the theta P and also function of the gamma, the phase retardation. We can rotate the transmission axis of the polarizer to perform the phase modulation mode. Now I describe the optical implementation using a twisted nematical liquid crystal panel. In our study we use the TN panel to be the special line modulator. A single TN LC panel is shown as the figure which is also sandwiched by a pair of polarizer and analyzer. We can rotate and select a suitable orientation of the polarization pair to achieve phase modulation and serve as the keymasker. Right is the phase modulation characteristic of the TN LC SOM. This is the angle of the polarizer. As we know in our system we have to display the phase encode input image and keymasker in the object arm. So we need two pieces of the TN LC SOM in the object arm. Here I show you the cascadic TN LC SOM modules. Here we use a telescope imaging configuration to cover SOM 1 and SOM 2. We can display the input image on SOM 1 and keymasker on SOM 2 by using a computer. Here I show you the schematic drawing of the experimental cell art which is modified in the architecture where three phase modulation is shown. The cell art is shown in the object arm and the reference arm. The cell part of the cell is laser with the wavelength of the 532 nanometer. It is used as the cohenin light source. A PGT driving phase shifter. The button is the photo of the cell art. Now I describe the experimental procedure. In the encryption we display the input image here on SOM 1 here and the keymasker on SOM 1 and SOM 2. The CCD camera is used to capture the encrypted hologram. For making key hologram we display the keymasker on SOM 3 and the turn of the SOM 1 and SOM 2 for making key hologram in the reference arm. We display another keymasker on SOM 2 and the turn of SOM 1 and SOM 3 for making key hologram in the object arm. Then for the encryption we present the keymasker for key hologram to open the encrypted hologram and the line reconstruction procedure. Now I show you some of the experimental result. A is the image to be encrypted. B is the encrypted hologram. C is the key hologram in the reference arm. D is the key hologram in the object arm. From E to H is the decryption result with or without the keymasker. E is the case of the no keymasker presented and F is the keymasker presented only in the reference arm. G is the keymasker presented only in the object arm. H is the decrypted image by the correct double keymasker. Here we experimentally demonstrate and verify the result. In summary we have proposed and demonstrate our full face digital holography encryption system using electric address face keymask which can be implemented by the LQC special line modulate operated at the face mode. The proposed encryption technique provides the possibility of performing high data security and the potential of flexible keymask design by digital computer programming and online processing. Thank you for your attention. Now open question. Thank you Mr. Tsang. I know the distribution system is very useful in this question but I'm afraid the backhand noise in the disk and the distribution should be reduced. So what's the solution in your research or in the future to reduce the backhand noise? Your question is about how to make a compact of my system. No, a backhand noise. A backhand noise. Oh, a backhand noise. There's a little bit confused. The result, you can see a little bit of noise. This is not a speaker noise. It's due to the alignment and optical element. You know that each LQC cell has an open ratio. It will affect the decryption result. It is a transmission hologram. Here the speaker noise is not so... It's not a big problem. Any more questions? How much is signal to noise ratio? In simulation we can get perfect, almost perfect reconstruction. I mean the decryption image. But we do not evaluate in actual system. More? More questions? Maybe I will discuss with you because our time is very limited.
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This work describes a digital holographic encryption technique based on programmable double key masks configuration. The double key masks are designed and implemented by using electrically addressed liquid crystal spatial light modulators operated at phase modulation mode. The architecture of four-step phase-shifting digital holography is used to generate the double key holograms for implementing the encryption and decryption. Both simulation and experimental results show that the feasibility of the digital holographic encryption system with double key masks in the Fourier or Fresnel domains for performing high-data-security properties and security enhancement. The proposed encryption system with electrically-addressed spatial light modulators provides the flexibility of key mask design by on-line processing.
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10.5446/21846 (DOI)
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Good morning everyone. Okay. The title of my second presentation is dynamic digital holographic display based on digital micro-mirror device and the improvement of optically reconstructed image quality. So in this paper we proposed a new image processing method to process the original digital holographic hologram and we obtained a filter hologram. Then we used the AMD-based data projection system to display the filter hologram then and improves optical and reconstructed image quality. So the content includes recording and numerical reconstruction of digital of Fx failure of Horowitz. And we propose that we combine the frequency demand filtering and rebuilding of filter Horowitz with high contrast. Then the quantitatively evaluate the reconstructed image quality of the original and filter Horowitz. That can add the last. We construct a DMD-based optical display system and give some experiment results of the image improvement. Introduction. As we know, liquid crystal display, liquid crystal on silicon and digital micro-mille device has been used as special light modulator to dynamic display digital holograms or computer generated holograms for three dimensional holographic display. So it could form the basis of the future holographic TV and movie concepts. Cheaper universities Japan use LCD to construct a holographic video display system. And the University of Texas use DMD to build a hologram projection system. The problem is the CCD and DMD has low spatial resolution which is only about 100 lines per millimeter. This is one to two orders of magnitude less than conventional holographic recording material. So the optically reconstructed image of digital Horowitz displayed on SCRM has very small diffraction angle and is not likely separated especially from zero order and twin images. It results in the lowest single to low ratio and brightness. So two popular numerical reconstruction methods are used to eliminate the zero order and twin images and obtain complex amplitude of object wave front. The first method is spatial frequency filtering. It uses a computer to calculate the Fourier transform of the digital holographic. Then eliminate the frequency components of the zero order and the twin images. Then you manipulate calculate the object wave front. The second method is called as face shifting digital holographic. It's proposed by Professor Yamaguchi. It uses face modulator to change the face of reference beam. Then use a computer to do numerical operation to obtain the complex amplitude of object wave front. So this method are also our numerical solutions. Our proposal is to propose a new two-step digital imaging processing method. It consists of filtering infrared concept of man. Then we rebuild the filter hologram with high contrast. Then the filter hologram is project using DMD projection system. So the object hologram is processed and the optically reconstructed image quality is improved significantly. This is a conventional recording geometry. Because of the low spatial resolution of CCD, the angle between the object wave and the reference wave must be limited to several degrees. The finger tool gives the object, original object. It's a Chinese character, means light. So the finger three is original of X failure hologram. Finger four is the reconstructed image of finger three. So from finger four, we can see that the zero-order image contains most of the reflected light intensity and occupies a large area in the center of the imaging plan. As a consequence, the reconstructed original image and the conjugated image will be interfered by the zero-order imaging and has very low brightness. So our proposal is to propose a new method which includes frequency domain filtering and rebuilding our filter hologram with high contrast. The first step is calculating the Fourier transform of original digital hologram. Then we use window function as special filter to perform the filter ring operation. So finger five is a Fourier spectrum of original hologram. Finger six is the filter Fourier spectrum. So the frequency component of zero-order is successfully eliminating. The third step, we calculate the inverse Fourier transform of the filter Fourier spectrum containing only the frequency components of original and twin images. It results in the rebuilding of a new filter hologram. Finger seven is the filter hologram. As a comparison, we also give the original Fourier hologram. So we can see that the contrast of filter hologram is much higher than that of the original hologram. Finger eight, we give the numerical reconstruction of A, original holography, and B, filter hologram. So visually, the brightness of reconstructed image of filter hologram is much higher than that of the original hologram. Okay. In this section, we are quantitatively evaluating the reconstruction image quality of original and filter holograms. And two merit factors of a single-truth ratio and image brightness are introduced. We can see the image brightness B is the summation of all the pixel intensity, which corresponds to the diffraction efficiency of the digital hologram. Table one gives the comparison of the reconstructed image quality of original and filter hologram. So we can see that the relative brightness and the single-truth ratio of the original hologram is only 0.36 and 1.5. But the filter hologram has the relative brightness of 1 and the single-truth ratio of 4.3. So the merit factors of S, A, and R, and image brightness of filter hologram are all increased by approximately 200%. So we think that the high-pass filtering operation eliminates the forward spectrum of the zero-order image and effectively enhances the contrast of the filter hologram and improves the image brightness of the reconstructed image. We use DMD to construct optical reconstruction systems because DMD has merit advantages over liquid crystal device, such as higher light efficiency, higher image contrast, shorter response time, and more grand-scale tones. Bingo line shows a schematic diagram of our dynamic digital holographic display system. The digital hologram is transferred to the DMD for display. Then the columnated beam is used as a reconstructed beam. Then we use a convergent lens to obtain a real image of the hologram. This bingo gives a multiple image of DMD reconstructed holograms because DMD has a discrete component. So the right image shows one component of the reconstructed image. Bingo gives experiment results of the optical reconstruction image using our DMD-vested projection system. Bingo A is an optical reconstructed image of an original digital hologram. B is an optical reconstructed image of a filter hologram. From the experiment, we can see the optical reconstructed image of a filter hologram is also much better than that of the original hologram. It agrees well with theoretical simulation. In this paper, we propose a little step method to process the original digital hologram to obtain a filter hologram. The theoretical simulation shows that the filter hologram has much higher single-tourist ratio and image brightness than the original hologram. The enhancement factor is about 200%. A DMD-vested digital hologram display system is constructed to project the filter hologram rather than the original digital hologram to achieve a higher image quality. The optical reconstructed image of a filter digital hologram is visually much clearer and brighter than that of the original hologram. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your questions. Wow, Suzana, I have a question. Do you have plans to use that in holographic television? Or why are you doing this work? Will you use that for holographic television? In this paper, we just show a new method to improve the optical reconstruction image. Because the projection system is reported previously by other research teams, so we didn't show some animation in this paper. What plans do you have for future? Where do you want to use this system? Sure, we want to construct a dynamic holographic display. Thank you.
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Digital holography uses CCD camera to replace conventional photographic plates for holographic recording, it features quick digital recording, high precision and reliability, no wet chemical processing, etc. Using Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) and liquid crystal display (LCD) as spatial light modulator (SLM) to dynamically display digital holograms and computer-generated holograms (CGHs) for three-dimensional holographic display could form the basis of future holographic TV and movie concepts, but due to the low spatial resolution of CCD and SLM, the optically reconstructed image of digital off-axis hologram captured by CCD and displayed on SLM has very small diffraction angle and is not likely be separated spatially from zero-order and twin images, it results in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) and image brightness. In this paper, a new two-step method, which involves in filtering in frequency domain and rebuilding of filtered hologram with high contrast, is proposed to process the original digital hologram and improve its optically reconstructed image quality for 3-dimensional dynamic holographic display. The first step is calculating the Fourier transform of original digital hologram, and using a proper window mask as spatial filterer to eliminate the zero-order component in the frequency domain. The second step is calculating the inverse Fourier transform of filtered spectra only containing the object and conjugate components, then rebuilding the filtered hologram with high contrast. Theoretical calculation shows that the optically reconstructed image quality of filtered digital hologram is much better than that of original digital hologram, the merit factors of SNR and image brightness of filtered hologram are all increased by approximately 200%. Then a dynamic digital holographic display system based on DMD is constructed to project the original and filtered digital holograms for comparative investigation, and the experimental results also show that the optically reconstructed image of the filtered digital hologram is visually much clearer and brighter than that of the original digital hologram. The image enhancement method and the dynamic holographic display setup demonstrated in this paper can be expected to find the practical applications in dynamic three-dimensional display, three-dimensional medical imaging, virtual reality, etc.
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10.5446/21847 (DOI)
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It's very regret that Professor Ni Yutang has other things, so let me speak inside. My name is Hong Yun. I come from Guangzhou, the Institute of Electrical Technology, and the Academy of Science. This morning, Professor Zhu of Sichuan University has introduced the DMD marriage, so I don't repeat the part. I may introduce our work. It is not so common that the DMD is used as an interface device in coherent optic information processing system and law, because ETI only supplies the chip with special permission in addition to the control circuits of DMDs very complicated, which contains several major components such as a GES, reset, frame data load, and refresh. In this scale transformation, PWM gray scale modulation, color composite timing, and its driver chips is dedicated. It is very difficult to make it in the other wave of peaks, and even is not introduced in detail in the reference. I introduced overwork. We researched the DMD starter and its operation principle directly in details. The circuit starter and the signal control flow of very common types of converters, there are few projectors including power and control, and the protection mechanism, new HPNAM control, and detection. Color wheel control and detection circuit analyzed the main control circuit board of the DMD was retained, and the digital circuit was added on which to simulate the literary control signals. The paper also describes how to reform a commercial therapy projector into a compact bisod light modulator that converts input digital image signal to digital coherent optical image. In experiment, the modulation characteristics of the incident light and multi-spectrum imaging characterized the characteristics in the modified DMD-spicern light modulator where the data waves and compact for every transform-based system for multi-spectrum coherent light image output was designed and assembled. As an application example, we used the modified DMD-spicern light modulator to build up a syncytical holographic stereo diagram generation system by inputting dozens of time-discrete-digrate-digit images into the DMD recording the search of sub-ohm hologram h1, h2, up to hn in the way of space. Vertically in photosensitive fade, dynamic visual effects and low-noise holographic stereo gram was generated into step-dream-bore-home measures. DMD-spicern light modulator, thousands of tiny aluminum metal reflective lenses which can be tipped on the DMD are fixed in the hidden uke that collects the reverse hinge and supports for the reversing hinge structure which can be dealt by plus-minus 12 degrees. The posts are connected to the pulse-reset bars below which can provide reset. Pulse voltage to each lens, lens hinge structure, and the posts are formed on conventary vital oxide semiconductor circles and pair of JSC in-next-hose studies. When applying the voltage on address electrodes, the pulse-reset voltage will apply to the lens structure. The pulse-reset electric will produce static electricity to attract one side of the lens and the address electrode. Lens field cuts and contacts the landing side electrode which has the same voltage. On this point, the lens position is locked by the electric and mechanical method. The lens will touch plus 12 degrees if a binary digit is stored in the memory unit. But minus 12 degrees if a binary digit is stored just like a C-sword structure. Figure one is a single pixel structure, the completion of the SK-Metal Diagram on the DMD. It includes three physical layers and two air-gap layers. The air-gap layers separate three physical layers and let the lens cut plus minus 12 degrees. Its micro-measure of DMD can reflect the incident tonight into directions. The actual direction of the reflection depends on the state of the underlying memory unit. When the memory unit is in the un-state, the memory is built here to plus 12 degrees. But if the memory unit is in the off-state, the measures will be delta minus 12 degrees. If the light incident on the DMD is with appropriate angle, the measure will control the incident light into all of the del-flame of the projection lens. Thus making the refractors in un-state looks very bright. Off-state looks very dark as shown in figure two. When the DMD is working, it will take about 18 microseconds to change the micro-measure from plus 12 degrees to minus 12 degrees. Finally, power-based technology can be used to restore the image of the grey scale by controlling the timing of the micro-measure on or off switching. Binary Zeta signal was sent to its memory unit of the DMD to control light switches. Night switch time is decided by the binary design signal bit and eventually micro-measure modulators. The inside light to optical pulse four observers. Four observers because the optical pulse time frame is much more than the visual suspense time frame. So it will like that one observes a fixed brightness of night. 8-bit binary digital signal can generate 256 grey scale night out-of-pulse. For displaying color images, we can use grey DMD chips in same-sizing mode for DMD chips in further sequential color mode as shown in figure two B. Modification of the DMD spacer light modulator based on the commercial DRP. Figure three is the blocker diagram of typical single chip DMD projectors electric principle. The DMD is controlled by the BIM processor embedded to the console board. Modification of the processor for the DMD spacer light modulator usually relates to three parts. Include power, magnet, UHP lamp detection and machine safety testing, color wheel motor control and color wheel operation detection are shown in figure three. Following is demonstration of the modification steps based on ASA7765PA presenter. The power supply for ASA7765PA presenter is composed by two levels of transforming and regulating. The first level is composed by the voltage regulator circuit with L6561 chip which transforms the input voltage into 240 voltage for the second level power circuit. The second level power supply is composed by PQ3RF23 and UC3843 which is responsible for providing the plus 10 voltage plus 5 voltage plus 3.3 voltage for the DRP products. The second level power supply is also provided by the regulator to the power supply board of the UHP lamp. The start up process is when the projector is plugged into the power, the second level power circuit generates a piece plus 5 voltage plus 12 voltage for DRP main control board. Then the projector is sent by status after pressing on the power switch the DRP main control board. It shows 5 voltage control signal to activity, activity, the second level power supply. At the same time it also shows control path to the lamp power supply board. When UHP lamp is working normally the lamp power supply board will produce feedback. When the DRP board detects this feedback signal it will generate a control signal to the second level power. It will generate a control signal to the second level power board to provide plus 3.3 voltage to the DRP chip and the projector will enter the normal operation state. Otherwise it will set the alarm. In the modification a simple extra circuit is added so that DRP board can detects the plus 5 voltage which means UHP lamp is working normally. And what will be the power supply to be in working status? UHP lamp testing and projector safety testing. In general the DRP projector has interlock protection feature such as whether the UHP lamps are plugged in the protection board are covered the lamp is overhead or cooling fan is working normally. Once the DRP board detects any of these in abnormal status it will set the alarm during the modification we need to simulate the interlock protection carefully. For example when detecting the lamp power protection switch if the lamp power exists it should be in on status so in the simulation we can shoot them directly same as the overhead protection and cooling fan detection. Color wheel motor control and color wheel precision detection. The ASR7765PA projector is single chip DMD protection system. It uses rotating for segments color wheel to produce 120 RGB plus W color fields for a second to achieve the color image display. As three phase brass leaf DC motors is used as color wheel jambles. It is controlled by 8902 CRBA chip the color segment processing detecting is achieved by that reflective photoelectric switch is installed next to the color wheel to generate the detection signal its round up color rotation will generate a class. As the color field sign processing. The most important thing of modifying conversely DRP projector to the competitors spiceman led modulator is simulation of color field processing single after the color wheel. In the modification we use the signal in the chip relationship in big four as reference we have considered that use a load resistor to replace the color wheel motor and use DC frequency divider circuit to generate color wheel precision detection signal from the motor driving signal. Because color wheel driving motor is an inductive load the chip 8902 CRBA requires to detect counter-inactile motive force of its face as a motor rotor processing and to load the correct phase current. After the color wheel motor is removed the counter-inactile motive force could not be detected. So that the chip 8902 CRBA stops working and is unable to provide sub frequency signal for this reason we utilize a digital logical circuit to simulate the processing for this reason detection signal of the color wheel processing directly and transfer it to the DRP control board by this way. The DRP control board works normally after removing the color wheel motor. This is a micro photogram of the DMD surface structure and the power special pattern of the diffraction lighter. Inverse flare transform result by using the other diffraction spectra. This is a multiple orders diffraction spectra. This is a competitor for a 3A transform system for multi spectrum co-herent light image reading out. This is a demand DMD spice of light modulator modified from DRP projector Acer7765PA. This is a scale medical block diagram of holographic stereogram recording system by using DMD. The B is the experimental setup of the system. This is stereograms created by the DMD holographic stereogram generation system. The experimental results represent that the DMD is a spice of light modulator with excellent optical properties which has many advantages such as having high light energy utilization rate high image contrast and wide range of gray scale levels. It is an ideal interface device for the co-herent optical information processing system. Ideal co-herent image with high brightness and low noise can be obtained by using a compact symmetric for every free transform system to read out of DMD multi-order diffraction spectra. Commercial DRP projector can easily be modified to DMD spice of light modulator having high property price rate by using some digital logical circuit console. In addition, our experiment also explored the application of DMD spice of light modulator in the fast production of diffractive optical variable image and three dimension holographic radio displays. Thank you.
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The fabric of digital micromirror device (DMD) and its operation are presented. Based on analyzing the electronic circuits and control signals of several types of commercial DLP projectors, the circuits of the projector that relate to warm-up, inter-locked protection, UHP lamp control and testing and color wheel control and detecting are successfully separated. After having simulated these control signals by a digital logic circuit experimentally and applied them to the main control board of the projector, the DMD chip operates normally. The modulating and multi spectrum imaging properties of the modified DMD spatial light modulator are dealt with in details. A compact 4f Fourier transfer system is designed and assembled for multi spectrum coherent image read-out. As a practical use, an experimental setup for holographic stereograms is established using the modified DMD spatial modulator. The created synthetic holographic stereograms have high contrast and low noise. The fabric of digital micromirror device (DMD) and its operation are presented. Based on analyzing the electronic circuits and control signals of several types of commercial DLP projectors, the circuits of the projector that relate to warm-up, inter-locked protection, UHP lamp control and testing and color wheel control and detecting are successfully separated. After having simulated these control signals by a digital logic circuit experimentally and applied them to the main control board of the projector, the DMD chip operates normally. The modulating and multi spectrum imaging properties of the modified DMD spatial light modulator are dealt with in details.
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10.5446/21850 (DOI)
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My talk of fabrication of HOE using CGH technique and laser direct light resorphylaxis system. Our recent is demand to the diffractive optical element is increasing with the development in the micro fabrication technology. In this research the application of direct light laser discography DWL system to the generation of diffractive optical elements is examined. The formula for the estimation of exposure data volume for DWL is presented as a function of DOE parameters and approximation accuracy. We created a relative large holographic optical elements HOE with same course of production of DOE using the DWL system that has future of high resolution drawing and high accuracy position system. It is difficult to draw to a large size substrate with electron beam lithography system since the DWL system make it possible production of the large HOE is expected. Furthermore, binary phase type HOE was easily produced by wet etching processing to the glass substrate and in order to obtain a bright image a comparison of the diffraction efficiency of the two level phase type DOE and four level phase type one was examined on Fresnel zone plate. The diffraction efficiency is influenced by etching depths of holographic grating. Therefore, we manufactured a phase type HOE of a required grating depths with accuracy using a reactive ion etching RIE system. Now, usually we make a micro fabrication technology and then the like this ring top flat image is DOE using DWL reservoir system in order to have a high diffraction efficiency. This research, the final goal, the final goal is application of one holographic optical element system for transmitting visual information to a long distance as a practical use of display hologram with bright image for road sign. Seventh ISDH at WERS we proposed and demonstrated the method which constructs large size bulk color image using holographic technique in limited spaces. For example, tunnels, a traffic sign image of the same size and color as an actual traffic sign boat is displayed using many comparative small holograms. Each hologram is composed of a computer generated hologram, CGH. Though it was necessary to make many CGHs, we have shortened the producing time of the holograms by putting reconstructed image on long distance and using many reconstruction sources. Moreover, the cross talk images are caused in color reconstruction by adjusting the optical system. It is possible to make sure that drivers will only see the appropriate image. Many holograms, our experimental holograms are 50 holograms. Many holograms function as one big hologram as it was being confirmed to be able to display a big reconstructed image in limited space. In Japan, an underground tunnel network has come important for expansion of urban traffic. In this case, it is necessary to set up traffic sign boat. In tunnels, one example of the size of sign boat being used now is 1.2 meter in length and 4.8 in width. In the construction of the tunnel, it is necessary to create enough space for both vehicles and placement of the traditional sign boat. If the sign boat can be composed optically of small holograms in vertical direction size, the space to be dug can be greatly reduced, which is a big advantage when thinking about the cost of construction. This research tries to display an image of the same color and size as the physical sign boat being used now, optically by using many small holograms. Now, we show you display hologram for road sign past data. This is 6 years old. It's a monochromatic image. This is in experimental room. It's a hologram that is now extiring area. Just we can use the tunnel in an experimental position. Like this situation, the hologram is based on film. Using the image setter, resolution dot point is 4000 dpi. This is experimental. The difference between the two is about 20 or 30 meter. Image distance is 40 meter. Next, color hologram. This is RGB reconstructed image. Viewing point is about 50 or 100 meter apart from first hologram. Object distance is about 1000 kilometers. Situation is equivalent to passing view from the window. Through the window, you can see the moon. Same situation. We have many holograms, about 50 holograms. Beam delivery is using fiber. Laser is RGB laser. This is experimental room. This one is a tiling area. This is correct image, RGB color image. Other image is a cross talk image. This image is far away, 1000 kilometers. In this case, the experimental position is under the highway bridge. This is 20 centimeter hologram. 10 holograms. Total 50 holograms. In this case, in the car, the car view, the image. This line is not correct setting. Now, we use the material of holograms. Like this, industrial material for photo mask just cost is low. Material size is 2.5 to 8 inch. Substrate thickness is 1.5 millimeter. Clómmium, same field, chrome oxide is a', z', b', photoregist. Substrate is a souldermap or quartz brass. For example, the trener zone plate, calculation of the free gamma We use the Mach-Torago Soft. The Soft Limited is a calibration point is 3,000 times 3,000. If spatial fluency, something big point is 1,000 dot per milli and then just 3 times 3 square millimeter. And on the computer, we connect some many data easily. In this case, 30,000 times 30,000. The size is 30 times 30 square millimeter. This is a direct right laser lithography system. It's a photo mask. We modified the holograph computer generated hologram. In this machine, laser is the wavelength of helium-casium laser like this. Now, high resolution lenses are N-Ways 0.55, minimum spot diameter, 1 by E square, 0.8 micrometer. Stage alignment accuracy is 20 nanometer. Explosive speed, maximum 100 millimeter per second. This is a granite-based stage. This is a focusing lens. This is a stage. The stage is an analog stage made in USA. This is an interferometer. It's a heterodine interferometer made in Renishaw, made in England. This is a helium-casium laser made in Japan. All systems are made by Germany. First, we have an amplitude binary type hologram in this type. Next, in order to get high diffraction efficiency, amplitude type hologram to phase hologram. Finally, it's easily, but in the theoretical efficiency, 40 percent of it. Just four levels, to change four levels, 81 percent, eight levels, 95 percent. Now, we try the four level phase type hologram. This is a relatively exposed energy to development photoregist. From this data, we can use the four level exposure. Now, this is a RI reaction-yone etching. The recipe data is GAS-CATF3. GAS flow rate is like this here. Firstly, photoregist is like this four level pattern. Next, RI etching is like this quartz-glass pattern. If chromium mask pattern and then the etch rate is too low, and then next, we have glass and photoregist only substrate. At the end, glass stretch rate and photoregist stretch rate is the same area here. Left figure is a photoregist height. This line is micrometer size. This size is nanometer size. One, two, three, four level. And reactive ion etching to like this glass plate four level pattern. Then, CHF3 gas only is just like this roughly and CHF3 plus O2 almost fine. This is AFM image. This is the same image just roughly. CHF3 only. This is CHF3 plus O2. This phrenosome phase type program is four levels. Diffruption efficiency is 6.3%. And summary, using photoregist glass substrate results the chromium film. The etching time could be substantially reduced. The etching using the mixed gas of CHF3 with O2 created a fine surface compared with the etching gas only of CHF3. And the construction of the optical device with high quality became possible. In order to obtain more higher diffraction efficiency, the optimum mixed proportion of CHF3 and O2 gas must see in detail to get the same etching weight of the photoregist and the glass substrate. Its amplitude type is 7.9 at FD. Two levels are 37.8 for level 63.1. In this case, we have a definition of diffraction efficiency. One first order to instant light intensity. A practical use. This is an image amplitude type. This is a two level phase type. This is a microspoke image. This image distance is 1000 meters. But the difference being 1 meter. The image size is 65 to times 142 meter. This is an amplitude type and four level phase type. Not so good. Now, RIE machine doesn't work now from April. Just not so good. Just conclusion, the application of the large HOE was presented using the direct light laser lithography system. The diffraction efficiency was improved by the fabrication of four level phase type HOEs in comparison with amplitude type and two level phase type HOEs. Now, we are able to obtain diffraction efficiency of about two times by publicating the four level phase type FZT. We are attempting to publicate the four level phase type display HoloLens for the purpose of further improvement in the diffraction efficiency of display HoloLens. Thank you for your attention. Sorry, sorry. One image. In future, if we have good hologram and good settings, maybe like this in a tunnel. You can see the like this. Thank you. Applause. Yes, I have a question. I'm not sure if I understood exactly from the video if there were holograms one behind one another or because everything was so perfectly registered over a very large area. Was that sections of the one hanging hologram or did you have holograms one behind one another? Because everything was perfectly registered. That was very impressive. I just didn't really understand. Can you explain please? Overlap area is just not so good area. But the driver is a look up hologram. The hologram is maybe window. Image is backside about 1000 km. Maybe using the moon. Okay. Moon is more long distance. I have a question. What assumptions did you make about the height of the driver from the ground? So will a driver in a small car and a driver in a large truck who is sitting higher both see good alignment? Yeah. In this case, this hologram is just window. Image is backside about long distance. You can see this area is same stage. Thank you. We have another question from TJ. I have a question about this traffic sign. What is the typical brightness of this signage? What is the room space or square meter? What is the brightness of this signage? I have no idea. This reconstruction image is using the fiber delivery and laser power is adjustable real time. In Japan, I don't know the brightness system on traffic sign through the hologram. Maybe just difficult now. Okay. Simple question. Compared to current signage, this is brighter or dimmer? Last night, the hologram is diffraction efficiency of 5% less than 5%. This situation is laser power and using the fiber delivery is one fiber is very low energy. We need high diffraction efficiency of the hologram. Anyhow, for ordinary people, this is diffraction efficiency. Thank you very much.
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Recently, the demand to the holographic optical element (HOE) is increasing with the developments in the laser or holographic display technology. In this research, the application of laser direct-write lithography (LDWL) system to the fabrication of HOEs is examined. We created a relative large HOE with same method of production of the diffractive-optical element (DOE) using the LDWL system that has the feature of high-resolution drawing, high-speed drawing, and a high accuracy positioning system. Although it is difficult to draw to a large-sized substrate with electron-beam lithography system, since the LDWL system makes it possible, production of the large HOE is expected. Furthermore, a binary phase-type HOE was easily produced by wet etching processing to the glass substrate, and in order to obtain a bright image, a comparison of the diffraction efficiency of the amplitude-type DOE and the phase-type one was examined on Fresnel zone plate (FZP). The diffraction efficiency is influenced by etching-depth of grating of a phase type hologram. Therefore, we manufactured a phase type HOE of a required grating depth with accuracy using a reactive ion etching (RIE) system.
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10.5446/21853 (DOI)
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Hi. The artwork that I've been working on, the title of this paper is called Folding Space, Unfolding Action. And this work is the core of what I'm writing my PhD on. It's a part of my holographic practice. So in 2006 I was working on a series of holograms. Essentially I was capturing urban landscapes with my digital camera. And what I was interested in was the dynamics of the landscapes, the way the architecture guided the body through landscapes, and the way our mind created images of the urban landscape. So as this series developed, what I realized was really interesting was the way I was moving around these places. And I started to think about these works as postcards, as ways of me experiencing something, compiling it, putting it into a very compressed form of this hologram that could then be displayed somewhere else for someone else to see. This hologram, which is in the art exhibition, so you should go and see it, has a number of lines of movement in it. It's from Hungary. It's from the fisherman's bastion. And what I did was I moved around the architecture. And as you move just backwards and forwards in front of the hologram, what you see is essentially moving forwards, moving around, and these different movements that all compose of the experience of visiting this place. This hologram, I installed, my installations are quite strange, I have to say. This is the smallest gallery I've installed in. It's the width of a doorway. It's got a mezzanine level, so this is someone who's actually quite short in this space. And what I wanted to do with the postcards was put them as if they were an information placard. And then at the same time, I wanted to force people into a quite intimate relationship with the image. These holograms were mirror-backed transmission images, so what happens is the viewer actually sees a reflection of themselves in between, and in between the reflection of themselves is the hologram. And they have to move around the hologram to see the image, and in doing so, they're catching glimpses of themselves. Some people found this uncomfortable and try and get the hologram to sort of sit in between themselves and their reflection, whereas at other times, people sort of looked around the hologram and checked their hair. This is one of the pieces of that show, which was the invitations to this show were hand-drawn maps. So I invited everyone with an individual hand-drawn map to get to the exhibition, and I actually used those hand-drawn maps to make a hologram that showed people that they'd arrived at the exhibition. And this was in Cologne in Germany. So what I started to realize was that in the process of capturing these spaces, it was the experience and the feeling of being in these spaces that I was very interested in. And so I started to seek out spaces that had intense feelings, tight spaces, spaces of movement, multiple levels. This hologram, there's three pictures of the hologram here, is Paternoster. And this was taken in an open-face moving elevator, and I held the camera above my head, and I took photographs of myself as I was sort of moving through these different floors of an office building. I removed the office building because it was really very boring. And instead of the office building, I put infinite spaces, so the sense of that you're moving into these different floors, but each floor opens up into a very large space. This hologram, I wanted to exhibit in a way that also forced people into quite an uncomfortable situation. It was exhibited in New York with a cushion so people could kneel and look up at the hologram. Other people actually sat on the cushion and used their feet to push against the floor and slide backwards into the gallery in order to see the image. The hologram was actually designed for an exhibition in a stairwell. What happens in the stairwell is you have to look up to view the hologram, and you have to negotiate the stairs. This causes quite a discomfort. You want to look where you're going so you don't fall. You also want to catch the animation. The feeling of being in this pattern of style was mimicked by the experience of what it was to actually view this hologram. The second series in this hologram was Slide. I haven't actually installed that with the Slide yet, but the idea of this one is that as I slide down, and this is actually quite a deep space made out of different maps, the viewer will actually also be on a slide looking up, watching me slide as they slide. The top little animation here, this was part of my work with Urban Landscapes. I was capturing myself in those landscapes. There was many things I was looking for. One of them was quite dynamic, quite a femoral architecture, and architecture that was ambiguous as well in a sense of you couldn't quite tell where the ground was. The relationship to the body was the most strong relationship, the relationship to the shadow. The shadow stays fairly consistent while the architecture is really very dynamic. I started to decide that it wasn't enough for just me to experience this and to take these images and install them. What I did was I got all my friends, got them with their digital cameras, and arranged for all of them to come and photograph architecture in different formations. I went back to this same site a year later with 26 people and digital cameras. They photographed essentially a very similar image which I then compiled together, matching the shadows of the people, but to gain quite a large amount of dynamics in the architecture. It was an experience of herding cats. I don't think you should use your friends for your art like this, and getting people to form a circle, getting people to form into lines. Everyone was equipped with diagrams. We used all sorts of different ways of aligning our bodies to the space. It's a very interesting project and a project I want to do again. I've done some leak frog projects which work quite well where you've got a tag team of people with cameras. This was also playing on the ideas of Flickr and these photo pools. Even at this conference, there's hundreds and hundreds of photographs being taken from all these different perspectives. I was trying to do was map these together into something that was quite a combined experience. This was another example where we were all on a street in a figure of eight and we played a game of dominoes. You took a photo and then turned around and took a photo, and the next person took a photo and took a photo and took a photo and took a photo. It's actually causing the action of photography. The holograms that I made from the series are really very dense. They've got so much detail. They've got so many levels in them. The recognition of faces is so important to actually make them into any sort of recognisable form. This is all photos from one of the holograms, figure eight. When I exhibited these holograms, usually my work, I wanted entice movement. With these holograms, because they were so dense, I also had to confine the viewer. I had to get the viewer to stay quite still, to take time with the image, to allow themselves to really see that image, and at the same time encourage them to move because otherwise they wouldn't play the hologram. These holograms were installed in Bus Gallery in Melbourne and I modified office chairs so that the person's actually on a wheelie chair. There was a number of wheelie chairs in the gallery which set up all sorts of different movements and patterns. People rocking unison and slide across the gallery. Perfect. This is one of the holograms. I'm afraid not a very good video, but you've got a sense of how much information is in there. In moving backwards and forwards, in this hologram, you're zooming in and out. I really like that translation of one movement to another. This hologram is also in the art form. With this hologram, there's two directions of parallax. If you go side to side, you move 360 degrees around the exhibition buildings, which the building turns to a lacework. It becomes quite insistential. If you move up and down, you actually follow the photographers. The photographers are squatting and then standing up. Essentially they're able to capture the whole building, which almost disintegrates in its presentation. For this hologram, I needed to install it so people were standing so they could get that up and down movement. It's another image from the gallery. What I found was that this up and down movement was quite different from side to side. The holograms that I made with the up and down movement had a very different proprioceptive experience in the viewer. I started to think about what this movement was. I started thinking about going up and down. At that point, I started thinking about jellyfish. I went to Korea and I made some stereograms of jellyfish. The original files were computer generated. It was quite a simple, organic thing to make in a three-dimensional program. The idea here was all about the installation. The first installation I did in Cologne, I put it in a window of the gallery where the postcards were inside and put a trampoline outside. The viewers were on the trampoline jumping up and down to see the jellyfish in the window. This was a surprise that developed as it got dark, so the trampoline got pulled out. After a few drinks, everyone was encouraged to jump on. Where this exhibition was really intended for was this is my New York home. I've been living on a passenger ferry. I thought that this is a perfect environment to display the jellyfish in because it's about all that lives around us. I set up the holograms around the trampoline. You can get a little bit of a sense of the movement. They really do. You start to notice all the fat in your cheeks and your bum because it really goes with the jellyfish as you go up and it stretches and you go down and you can feel this movement. Then the installation involved various people getting on the trampoline and jumping up and down. While one person was experiencing the holography, this was set up and this was something that was continued throughout the night so that this was something that everyone was watching the participants rather than the holograms. What my work is really looking at is that way that we move. Essentially you could say that the hologram isn't the finished work, it's the person jumping. That I'm essentially making a choreography for movement. Thank you. Are you ready for questions?
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This paper describes my practice of installing holograms in unusual spaces. From this work I look at how viewer movement can be activated by the holographic image and the role that this plays in reading that image. The holographic images I create are multiplexed either with hand cut stencils or stereographic printing systems. The imagery captures experiences, relationships to unusual architecture and postcard like messages. The image space is restructured through the capturing, digital composition and multiplexing processes. Space takes on a poetic form, hinged by internal relationships as well as having symmetries to the viewing space. My project based research with design tools, image composition and installation is part of my PhD on holographic image design at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, (RMIT University). By analysing my project work, this paper investigates the potentials of holograms to fold and unfold the space of experience.
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10.5446/21854 (DOI)
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Well good afternoon and thank you TJ and Dr. Fan for the invitation to come here to China. It's my first visit to China and it's actually kind of nice to have it be kind of like a homecoming. So many of my friends are here. We've come over as well as many as new friends that I have the opportunity to meet. So again, thank you so much. So this is going to be a 10-minute description of my first 20 years in holography. I'm going to go through the description of the video. Because it turns out that between 1979 and 2004, a significant number of advances in technologies made themselves available to people working in the holographic medium. So I want to give you a little bit of my background. In 1979, I was the manager of a professional photo lab. I spent my days basically color balancing prints to transparencies. And I spent my nights running around with a view camera photographing Chicago because I was really interested in becoming an art photographer doing landscape photography in those days. So basically I had a very astute background in advanced color printing and dye transfer work. But also at the same time I had run into a small hologram that thank you TJ for showing at the beginning of this section that little hologram of the car in playing back with laser light is the very first hologram that I saw at a museum and not actually a museum, but the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. And that had an impact on me not so much because it was a three-dimensional object, but because I was looking at red light. I was looking at an objects light that was really photons coming off of the film. So between 1979 and 1981, I spent my summers attending holography workshops with TJ who was bringing basically what has turned out to be the luminaries of holography over those years as guest lecturers in interferometry and color holography. And so that was my exposure to beginning holography, advanced imaging techniques. And additionally as the years went on, I also had the opportunity to be a guest lecturer at those workshops for photoresist and embossed holography. In 1980, I had the fortune of meeting another gentleman in holography, Tom Speckovich. We were both at a club, both trying to talk to the same girl who eventually introduced us to each other, saying, does this other guy that's talking to me about the same stuff as you, you should meet him. So that's how I met Tom. So in 1980, we started working on starting a holography group, the Chicago Holographic Cooperative. And out of that came Smith and Speckovich Holography. Our skill sets were about the process of making single and multiple color reflection holograms, multi-color rainbow holograms, reflection color holograms that are contact copy with a contact copy system. And then eventually led to a 36 camera real time capture system, as well as all of the embossed imaging technologies like 2D, 3D, full color 2D, RGB stereograms, in other words, full color stereograms with real life. So that first period of time was pretty extensive. But what launched it was in 1982. There was an improvement with the denisuke process. Pyrogalal developer and re-halogenating bleach had been a paper published a year before by Walter Spearing's. There were two papers that were published in 1982 at the first international conference on holography by Lon Moore and John Kaufman, which basically introduced the concept of using TEA, which is triethanolamine, as a pre-swelling technique. And Tom and I also had access to Zenith TV's research labs. We were working with them making HOEs for projection television systems. But because we had a key to the door, that meant we could come in at night and use their great set of tools by looking at phosphors on TV tubes and mapping the spectrum and look at our holograms and get some really good analytical data. So that helped in that first year. In 1984, I produced a small piece of one of my few art pieces, but I got to remember at the beginning of this, I was an art photographer looking for a way to subsidize my equipment. So this was a full color reflection piece that was done on Agfa film with GP62 and the P-benzo quinone process. This was called setting for one. That image and an additional image, this was an exploration in additive white light holography. Again, these are all done with a single frequency krypton laser, but using triethanolamine to specifically tune it to 630 nanometers, a green exposure for 530, a red exposure but tuned to green, and a significant blue exposure at 450. And so the thing that was going on here is we were able to show clients that we had a path to color holography in 1984, which was giving us cyan, magenta, and yellow as the subtractive additives of the primary colors, as well as white. And this really launched Smith Inspectorvich because at a point we took these, we were going around to advertising agencies in the Chicago area that were dealing with print. And we were showing them these initial pieces that were being done in color and one of them hit. An accounting set for the McDonald's Corporation and an accounting set for the Franklin Company who were basically interested in looking for new media and ways of getting attention and for marketing their product, approached us and said, well, could you do an art piece? And could you find a way to introduce holography into the corporate stores and use this as a tool to give the funding to advance how you can make holograms? So this was a pretty generous project from the standpoint of, here was a potential commercial customer saying, we think you're getting somewhere interesting. If we give you a big enough project, will that give you the money you need to take this a little bit further? So we got a project to do what we call the McDonald's corporate hologram piece. And for attendees in 1985 of the second international symposium on display holography, you all got loaded on a bus and taken down to Oakbrook, Illinois. And you got to see this. There were six panels. They were arranged in a six-sided display. Each image was 12 by 18 inches, either two or three colors, again, using the triethanolamine technique. There was the corporate store, Ronald Chew's, a Big Mac exploded apart, scary in and of itself. The fry maker, the multi-mixer, which is how Ray Kroc made his money to start the McDonald's change in a McDonald's corporate mantra. The fry slicer, I included this image because this was a photograph of one of the pull-outs from the run, but it gave you a little bit of an idea. I didn't do a lot of documentation of the holograms at that time, but this was the original fry slicer. At that point, McDonald's has basically shipped potatoes to all the stores and they cut their fries. And then we had a sculpture made of all these fries that were glued with hot glue to a glass plate and floated in front, going into a box. So this is an example of a three-color hologram that was done for that installation. And there was also a model made of the original corporate store. This was lit sequentially for three separate transmission masters for three color-tuned transfers. A red for the internal lighting of the scene, which is what you see the model here, being lit for the internal master for the internal lights. And then this is, unfortunately, a very small section of a much bigger photo. You can see here, they have gold arches with a red interior, which you can't see, as there was a beautiful blue sky and there were trees in the model that you saw through them. And this is the installation that was actually in Hamburger U, they called it, in Oakbrook, Illinois, and it has six-sided pieces. And it was really for a pretty gutsy thing to have gone in with two 5x7 holograms and say to them, within six months we're going to have this. But we did it, we delivered on time. And this pretty much gave the laser Smith Infective the ability to really commercially go after the tool set needed for halography. But mid-80s, there was also this other issue. We were talking to the people that we thought were the ones that wanted to buy halography. And these are people doing marketing and advertising and print pieces. And they kept coming back to Austin saying, well, yeah, this is interesting, but we're not finding it as compelling that we've got to make little models all the time or we've got to do sculpture pieces. We want real life. We want imaging of real products, real people in real time. And this is what we're hearing from everybody, Leo Burnett, Jay Walter, Thompson, all the advertising agencies that we're going to. They're basically telling us talent sells products. They want images of talent and 3D using them. So that basically led to this. In 1987, we decided we have to, and even go farther than doing a person on a turntable or an object on a turntable, I wanted to pull together a system that would allow me to capture in real time either a high speed event or a sequential animated event. So this system, which represented probably the biggest financial investment that we had tried to do up to that point, was capable of capturing a 90 degree field of view. It could do stop frame, which means all 36 cameras fired simultaneously. Or with this electronics mechanism we designed, I could just run from 9.9 seconds to 1,000th of a second. We had very good oscilloscope data that told us we were actually getting that phase consistently. This is an example of the system in the studio, our first client, after we put it all together and did a set of images, we did a couple of baseball holograms. You saw one in that previous set where we went to upper deck and say, okay, now we can do baseball holograms the way you want to do them, people in real life hitting the ball, sliding into home plate. We had a nice contract to do a set of stereograms for their first hockey release. And basically this was a very arduous process at this point. We're still doing analog holography in a way, metan math to compute and set up for the red, green, blue slip positions. An Oxbury optical head, which was a $35,000 investment for having high registration 35 millimeter film transport. For all of these holograms, we were interested in mass replication technology, so those are all being done with the argon laser at 457, so we were shooting photo resist H2s. The H1s were tipped. So in addition to the fact that the plates at a specific position and the red, green, blue is calculated, they're going to be found at a certain angle along that, the reference beam, the tip, the plate and the whole system was tipped so that the reference beam came in at exactly 90 degrees from that. So it was splitting the object beam reference and that angle. So the fringes were perpendicular in the emulsion. So then when the emulsion shrank drawing, we wouldn't get any fringe collapse. So we keep efficiency, the image wouldn't shift, we wouldn't get other complications. And we also, because we were shooting in the photo resist and weren't interested in trying to shoot photo resist H1s, because just the fact that we had to physically drag this optical mask across the film, we were shooting silver halide and using pyrochrome as a development process because that yellow stain actually was perfect for absorbing the scatter. So we produced very clean, high quality H1 masters that a number of people in Ken Haynes said, I can't believe you're not shooting photo resist H1s. But that led to, for me, where I got the chance to get back into doing holography as a medium for my own work. And this was a project that led to a very successful product line, it was holographic moments. These were a series of embossed holograms, some were of dance images, some were animation, some were CG in real life and some were mixed. But these are images that we produced and ran from 1989 until 1986. This one here is one of the frames. Well, we've lost our color channel. There we go. And what? We're not. Yes, we're good. We're RGB again. And this was actually one of the first ones we did when we were testing the camera system. And it was one of my favorite set in the series. We also did, began because, I'll wrap this up towards the end, I'll talk about the impact of this PC and its ability. But we also started doing work with the blue screen. So this was, Chicago has an extremely enthusiastic Chinese community. And so we went down there one Chinese New Year and found a great lion dancer headed down the street and said, would you like to come to our studio and we can make a hologram of you? What a come on line. And so this was, this is the sequence from that 36 frames done on a blue screen. Now play nicely. There we go. So here you see the animation. See here, very careful attention to color, the red, the green, the blue. There's almost like a magenta red in that outfit. This is a CG scene that I did on a little PC running 3D studio at the time. Another image that was in the series was the geisha girl. We did this in 92. This probably represented the highest quality mix of the whole thing. So again, she was shot on a blue screen. The background is basically dropped in. That was again, registered or rendered. We were doing all of this in-house. We had all of this technology in-house. We had the computer systems, the rendering systems. I had an Oxbury film recorder. We were rendering all of the positives necessary for the optical printer. So this was a complete in-house. I think we spent over $120,000 to basically over a four-year period put together the technology to do these. This is a close-up of the hologram, not of the photograph, of just one frame. We also started doing work in just entirely CG scenes. So this is kind of like a dinosaur-iron exhibit that comes to life in the display. If you're at the museum, it's just six years old. The last thing you want to see is the dinosaur come back alive. This one sold very well for us. And there's also kind of been a little bit of misinformation and some people that have written about stereograms. From 1989 until 1994, while the holographic gallery scene was still an active and healthy scene, the holographic moments series were selling on average 100,000 holograms a year. They were the most significant volume holograms that were being bought. And I think part of it is because they were in color, they weren't all gold, they weren't all green, and they were animated. So we were shipping holograms to Brainit in Japan. We were shipping holograms to all of the holography gallery people that were in the United States. And we were shipping holograms. And so I had a little studio with three ladies that came in every day and matted holograms. Basically a complete in-house operation. And it was, for me, really rewarding because this was what my image of holography was really kind of about instead of these 2D flat little stickers. So it was a very fun program to run for those years. But it was really expensive to do this. You have a 36 camera system. You have the CG, the workstations, the Oxbury film recorder, and it would take a couple of weeks from the time you put together the talent, shot it in the studio, created the scenes, did the direct positives, loaded the film recorder, shot the H1, shot the H2. So it was a serious endeavor. And you remember, the first ones we did were manually, optically registered in a little 35 millimeter slide copy machine. So it was a big step from the first ones in 87 and 88 to all the ones where we all did, I did all the post-processing in the computer. But in 1997, a wonderful opportunity came available for me because I had been watching what was going on with digital hologram printing at MIT and Steve Benton's group. And then the summer after I sold the laser snuts, I got a phone call from Steve Benton and he asked me basically, would I like to make holograms again? So basically, I joined the Media Lab in November of 1997. And my primary four areas of research that I was officially told I had to make sure we're getting done every month, headtracked autostereoscopic displays, streaming multi-camera capture systems, a one-step full-color, full-parallax holographic printer, and kind of ongoing work with full-color holographic material with not only the DuPont 800 series, but also with Baron Haider's BB-Pan series materials. Because we were always testing new films for potentially what the holography class was going to maybe need someday. So in an aspect of brevity, because I know there's still five more papers to go on this afternoon, one brief little piece. The full-parallax full-color printer was a new direction. Michael Klugeven at MIT, Zebra imaging took off and got its leap out of MIT. And when I came in in the fall of 1997, they had left. So there was a very compelling need to make the holographic full-color printer that I designed to be doing some new science and break some new ground. So we directly went for the DMD, which is the digital mirror device as a spatial light modulator. Again, the three colors we were using, Krypton 647, Frequency Double Yeag 532, Argonne 457. But the other piece of the puzzle that we brought to this, and you're looking at a close-up of the optical printhead right here, was going for a 0.5 millimeter square pixel and just-in-time open GL renderer. Because there were basically 250,000 holograms in every 8x10. So you didn't really want to pre-render these everywhere and set them on a hard drive. So we had a printer designed and just basically said, I'm at pixel this position, please render me pixel next position. So it was rendered and thrown in the buffer. The other key aspect of this is this printer has a design of being a translating optical head. So we have the ability to do roll-to-roll imaging. So in other words, we can make the hologram 20 inches wide and as long as you want it. And here's an example of one of the last pieces that was imaged with it. This was done in 2003. PONDA was our sponsor. These are 0.5 millimeter pixels. This is an image showing the left, right, and the view. And this hologram is on display over at the Holography Art Exhibition. So the key thing I think is important to bring with it, I want to bring a little bit of discussion to, is that importance is the selection of the wavelengths in doing color holograms. This is not a minor one. It isn't just the issue of whether you're recording them at what wavelength they're shrinking to, but what wavelength they're playing back, the sensitivity of your eye. These are all things that we bring as the viewer of the hologram to the equation as well. So I found we were able to get extremely good results with the German BB-Pan as well as the DuPont 800 series. And here's a small hologram that is of a Chinese opera mask. So on earlier opera masks, there must have been a set of these made. And this is, again, the hologram. But I threw this in your animations to show you just how accurate the color is. This was done in the DuPont material. So again, this is a bit old. This was imaged originally as a hologram in 2003, and I just shot this video the week before I came. So the basis to all of my color work is really my photographic background. I have a stensive background in densitometry, and so there would be always a great deal of effort, paid attention to where these fit on the CIE chart. When we built the printer, I did a lot of holograms of red, green, and blue pixels and white pixels, and basically graphed that and took a look at what the gamut of the final hologram was compared to the original scene. All of this, I think, has a good impact on how high quality the final holograms could be. So that pretty much wrapped up what I was doing by 2004, and I had kind of thought by then, I was done with holography, had done a number of things. The imaging market still hadn't taken off, but I got fortunate. This past fall, there was a job application that went out, and I thought, I'm going to do holography again, so I threw in my resume, and fortunately enough, I got a phone call to come in for the interview. So at DeMontford University, in the Modern Holography Program, I have specific responsibility for the NAHO project, which is a red, green, blue, edge-lit HOE program, but we're also going to be getting a pulsed red, green, blue laser, so there is going to be continued research on true color pulse imaging, and there's going to be continued research on full parallax, full color printer technology. I think having tools like this in the schools, like they have printers right now where students study in 3D can take photographs, reduce stereograms, and then print them on the printer and laminate them on the back of a sheet of lenticular screen, and then look at their art in 3D, there needs to be this complement as a piece of hardware for a student in 3D media, which is a holographic printer, and we're going to see if we can get that realized. Utilizing the prior research I did at MIT and also leveraging some new ideas that we have. So definitely take the time to go and talk with Martin Richardson, he's got a great advanced holography program, he's taking graduate students for M-Phil and PhD programs, and with that, I just want to say, Sheche, this is an earlier thought, yes, I was a younger man, this is myself, TJ and Dr. Dennis Duke in 1992. Thank you.
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Starting in 1978 until culmination in research with the Spatial Imaging group at MIT in 2004, a Personal Holography Journey details Artistic and Commercial work produced by Steven L. Smith. In the Late 1970’s, advances in holographic films and processing techniques made possible a second wave of artistic and commercial holography. These techniques leveraged the start of the professional holographic imaging studio, The Lasersmith Inc. In house research advanced holographic imaging into new areas of commercial and artistic development. Starting with controlled color reflection holograms, (Pseudo-Color reflection technique), the development of a real time capture system for embossed stereograms and finishing with research that realized a full color full parallax holographic printer at MIT, this paper details aspects of each of the critical technologies that were developed and commercialized along the way.
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10.5446/21855 (DOI)
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So as Professor Yashitawa said, my name is Pavel Stelkin. I am from Poland, from Polish Holographic Systems, and working in the field of, let's say, business holographic for more than 15 years right now. And first of all, I would like to thank Professor Yashitawa for his kindness and accepting me as opening this Saffron Session as a view of many timeshifts and delay of the people. So anyway, I will try to compress my talk, not to make further delays for other guys. So the people here is something which I never know what it means. So I wanted to, this talk was intended as first, first approach as the talk, showing artists the possibilities of modern optics, of mathematics, and recording device, which are usually devoted to security hologram master. So that's why this table might be not so accurate. But anyway, why we talk about generalized Fresnel lens in many applications. So I'm starting with introduction, presentation of our rainbow kinematics technologies, technology of recording rainbow patterns composed of fraction gradings. Then I will talk a little bit about Fresnel lens and its generalization. And then present several samples, some of the mainly samples designed of such structures for visual application. So it is something which I must fast that I am not, I am always, I always wanted not to create some abstract things, let's say just for scientific purpose. I always wanted to fulfill the needs of customers needing visual things. It can be hologram, sensor stricter, or it can be a structure, be city nice decorative structure. So let's go. So that's obvious thing that the world is changing very fast and requires new technologies. So I think it's nothing more than we are there. And the same refers to holographic industry which must develop and develop fast to not to lose his advantage and kill. And what is something which is not very widely present in the holograms is Fresnel lens. Fresnel lens is old, well-known approach of making thick element flat, reducing the invite, reducing making it just much more useful. And if you want to create some elements which are of good, which will influence the people which will help them make new things in holographic, we think to mix several technologies. So as I origin from rainbow holographic for security application, I think that it is, and in several other applications, mixing traditional rainbow holographic great things and new type of optical effects based on computer generated holograms and structures like Fresnel lens as something which could be very useful. So now as for introduction, I probably not necessary. But maybe the research is one person who don't know exactly the idea of Fresnel lens is to substitute the Fresnel lens. The Fresnel lens is the element which should substitute as thick and bulky normal lens. The Fresnel lens, here it is, let's say, illustrated only half of the thickness of normal lens. But it could be made 100 part of the normal lens being 100 times lighter and 100 times more easier to handle. Now I will talk a little bit about our machines. I'm a business guy, so I must recommend them a little bit. So many years, in fact, around 15 years ago at the Warsaw University of Technology, we have started developing some technology to record rainbow holograms. But rainbow holograms make traditional way, requires big lenses, expensive optics, expensive reliable laser. That all we have been missing at that time. So we decided to try to make a digital machine which will offer the same effect with the much lower cost. And from that trial, we made the first machine which was called Holomax. It was based on some sync line we could call interference, lithography, to record computer generated holograms. The machine went quite nice, even through quite a lot of calculations. It was sold to our German partner for exclusive use for some years. In 2000, in fact, in 1999, we have started developing another technology which would be simpler to use, requiring no calculations, especially no calculations by user. And think a four-day group and user friendly for, let's say, hologram design. So the machine which would not need a lot of people to operate, which would be easy enough to handle for, let's say, average people. This handling by average people maybe is a little bit not so easy, but generally we succeeded and since that time, we have solved around 30 machines worldwide. So this range of technology is based on production great things. And this ensures high brightness of the image. And due to the nature of the machine, it's very similar to the fringe printer shown before the break by our Japanese colleagues. Due to the nature, the nature is similar. However, we decided to record and to display only diffraction great and put every other element like stereogram and every kind of hologram, just as the mosaic or mixture of different diffraction great. This offered very nice brightness and good results with some disadvantages of CPC. So as this is a digital device and the differences are displayed on the screen, we can offer an almost unlimited number of pure rainbow colors and directions of view. This is what is important when you compare this to the matrix pictures, where usually you can record one color at once and to change the color and record another one. You need to make some changes in optical hats. Also, the resolution is very high. And the machine is very flexible, allowing for a lot of pictures for several applications. So I'm not sure if this is easily readable. But what we can see here, here we can see that's a more or less wide stereogram. We can see multi-channel image presenting many images during hologram flipping, some animation, colorful patterns, 2D, 3D, before and after hologram plane. So there are colorful effects, colorful, animated, and lens-like effects. Here there is no illustration. You can see in our folder there are also some type of rainbow lens also nearby. So this can be a complex, nice eye-catching image. It can be easily created. So this rainbow technology is based on design. This is flexible technology. And appropriate design is the key to achieve good results. So this is something which I thought is very funny abstract images resulting in the patterns, which you can see on the exhibition. So the two patterns which are exhibited are the patterns made on the basis of this design. So one of them, let's say, OK, I'm trying to go too fast. So in our machine, to have, to take advantage of full degree of freedom in software, we are using as an input two drawings, two grayscale, or one color, and one grayscale drawing. One of them refers for colors or Fourier frequencies, of spatial frequencies of the gray things. And another refers to directions or orientation of the gray things. So if we mix together this kind, let's say, there is two squares which are joining, took form, let's say, nicer artistic look. But there are two squares composed of the structure, which is calculated using some mathematical tool. This is just the map of some equation. And one of this is based on costing, and the other is based on senors. And if we made one of them as a map of colors and another as a map of directions, then all vice-versa, then we received two structures, shounon, the exhibition. This kind of, let's say, funny, abstract pattern leads to very, very decorative result. So in Kinemax-Lingwuch technology, we have also introduced an effect which is, I think, not reproduced by any other machine so far. We introduced something, the structure looking like full parallax, a relief structure, which we call embossing effect, because it looks like embossed glossy surface. Gloss, it is the most important work here, but this is not rainfall color. This is like grating modulated in the way imitating 3D structure. So this is the kind of samples I have with me. I may show in the brochures left at the exhibition hall. At the backside, there is a sample there. And this was something interesting, as using just ratings, we have received very, very bright, very nice 3D kind of effect. It is not deep, but the illusion of 3D is very, very nice. So a little bit later, I will show you the design for Fresnel Lenses, the same design as work as an post-affirmed comparison. So what about Fresnel Lenses? So we all know that Fresnel Lenses are useful gas. They have been started using for sea light, just because they are just thinner and the sea lights, light hours require big lenses. So they are imitating sea lights by flat pattern. And from the present point of view, they are just phase modulation devices. They need asymmetrical profile structures, maybe, even less than micron-seq, right now with current possibilities. And by generalizing the Fresnel Lenses approach, by generalizing the way of flattening the full-key image, we can create a lot of very interesting patterns. So not only really 3D shapes, but also we can use drawings, interesting illustrations of mathematical equations or fractals to create what I think is just a decoratif. So this is the illustration of Fresnel Lenses, how it looks as a map of depth, where we have the white in the middle is for the white. White in the middle is the point most in front of, and the black is the deepest point. And the whole structure and magnification looks like left side. But that was normal lens. And the normal lens is now often fabricated by rotating diamond tools or mechanically. So we can make that Fresnel Lenses of any shape. And it can be cylindrical just from a, let's say, flat straight lines, which is focusing the light simply in two lines. We can make elliptical, which is with double focus, like the astigmatical lens. And we can make much more. We can make Fresnel Lenses from fractal image. This makes just another artistic view of fractals. The fractals is the structure I always love. And other samples I will show you the pattern. So this one I will present you here. It is simple but very decorative working. We can create three ways astigmatical lens. It is very interesting. Might be also useful. Now I have created these things just for us artistic, just for the collective purpose. So that structures, always my own, are quite difficult to write. They need either electron beam or very special thing. So we decided to modify our rainbow which was able to record the fraction gate in something to make also a possibility of writing just excess. And after somewhere we succeeded the resolution of the display. That is not as high as Japan achievements. But it works. And the decorative patterns can be written with quite high speed. And what's more important, we have made the device. With dual heads, one for the recording holograph. Fringe is just the fraction gate. It is high brightness. And one to record direct writing structures by a lithograph. So this is what is also the other key of the treatment. We haven't concentrated on structures which must be calculated before. We wanted it to enable the people who draw some interesting drawing to put immediately into the machine and have nice results. So we incorporated that, that finalizing algorithm to change, to convert the black and white grayscale design into frontal lines. So this is made automatically. The user does not need to worry about it anyway. So that was what I said. It just needed a grayscale heat mark where level of gray represented depth of view. Like in a ground relief map. And then we can use several designs as the base for this. So here we have the flower made of old elliptical lenses. This is just a structure we made before comprising of standard frontal lenses of different size and post-packs. We can use nice corner tube pattern as a base for a frontal corner tube pattern or random prism structures, which is very interesting for decorative applications. But we can also use hand-drawn patterns. So this is something which may be interesting for artists that if there is hand-drawn black and white pattern, we can immediately convert it into, in fact, a kinophone containing the phase information of such object. So those are just the samples. This is one of our follow-up maps. This is the epitocity element of the structure I have shown before. And what we have presented, I wanted not to concentrate on machine. I wanted to concentrate on what we can do with modern optical machine. So we can do video effects on standard photoresist plays, even up to 40 centimeter big, and combine rainbow hologram with white structures. And so the rest, I think you can imagine. And for the end, just before final thinking, I want to show you how such structures may look like from the perspective of the same model. I think that is maybe too small to be very, very visible. And what I also show now, right now, is the field. OK. I must go downstairs. I want to show you how decorative effects are coming from this kind of structure. So just using that symbolizer and randomly going through it, we have a funny rotating flow. So if anybody is interested, I invite to come and talk to me in the break, because now I think we have not so much time. So thank you again, Professor Shitaba, for your thanks. And thank you all for your hope. You liked it. OK. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. OK. Anybody have a question or comment? OK. I have one question. OK. So you showed that the two marks, direction map, and is it easy for designers to design their own concept? Yes. OK. So it is a very difficult question. It is easy to design, to grow the map like of this plane. The artist, skipped artists should have no problem. The design like math art, like these pentagonal patterns, they are difficult. Because it is, let's say, some sort of my view. I was using formulas to create the structure. So I think it works nice as a partner's pattern. It is easy and difficult. If you want to play with formulas, it is not easy. Because this is just a simple formula for x and y or in radial coordinates. Any questions or comments? OK. One more question. Can you provide a small show during the break? No. But at the break, at the point, can you provide a small demonstration? OK. Of course. Thank you. For the science, please welcome. Thank you.
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The eye of a man is perfectly designed by nature, but still it can be deceived. This attribute is the basics of holography, especially useful for making the 3D effects. In traditional rainbow holograms the diffractive pattern is recorded to be visible in white light as 3D image, but with parallax in one direction only. Is it possible to easily create a computer generated pattern which will be visible by the viewer as 3D image with parallax in all directions (like a relief)? Yes, it can be achieved using generalized Fresnel lens to calculate structures then recorded by optical lithography. The Kinemax technology was originally designed for exposing rainbow holograms with best diffraction efficiency. The further development of both optics and software enabled the possibility of using of Kinemax system as optical lithography unit. The essential feature of optical lithography is exposing images directly, with very high resolution. The Fresnel lens is well-know method of imitating thick real lens by the flat pattern, which modulates the phase of light. It is possible to imitate spherical lens, cylindrical lens etc. But it is also possible to make a lot more complicated designs, which will be visible for the viewer as full 3D reliefs, being less than micron thick. The exposed pattern is calculated in the similar way as the pattern of the Fresnel lenses. New Kinemax-Litho system combines generalized Fresnel lens calculation technique with optical lithography recording, allowing to expose very complicated, highly detailed designs. However the designing process is very simple, does not require much of technical or theoretical knowledge. The depth of 3D relief is represented on the design by the level of gray in a 8-bit grayscale bitmap file, in the way similar to the change of colors on the relief map. So the only limitations in preparing the designs is imagination and graphical designing abilities.
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10.5446/21856 (DOI)
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Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're about to start now so if you're not in your seats, I can't do anything about that. The first thing is, I don't think very many people understand, it's actually a holographic exhibition running next door and Dr. Fanners asked me to remind you of that fact. So, first of all, I'm going to kick off this session here with a DVD recently made by me and this particular piece explores the concept of displaying images from digital holograms in two-dimensional form. So here we have a list of where the exhibition was actually run in Peterborough, Gretel and Central London and I thought it was rather interesting that we put all this effort into digital holography and sometimes they don't actually need the three-dimensional. So this is really a sequence of two-dimensional slices from the digital formats or digital holograms. Starting with David Bowie, I was fortunate enough to record as a stereogram several years ago. This is the exhibition of the Air Gallery in Central London from around 18 months ago. So these are all three-dimensional headscanners using a rotational bitmap scanner and I've introduced things such as interference patterns. Here we have a three-dimensional headscanner Martina who was just here. Here we have 3D glasses on the inside. She was in 3D. One of my favorite pieces there are Digital Dreams. It's kind of weird when you are looking at these, something takes on a completely abstract form. This piece is called Alien Head and you can see I'm introducing elements of photographic imagery with the scouts. America, that particular figure is about 3 centimeters tall. And of course when you're working in post-production techniques you can start to superimpose and add the same image many, many times. Here we can see digital headscarred holograms that Jonathan shows in his exhibitions. Again Martina, and interesting views. I apologize about that but you know, it's all in the interest of research. As Dave the Rave saying goodbye I'll give me your money. And he's disappeared because I didn't give him any. And then we move on to some of the books. I think a lot of you have already got these. If you haven't let me know at all, I'm glad to give them to you. I'm glad I promoted myself and my website. Okay, so that's really, that's one portion of my new DVD which is coming out as soon as I can afford to get it out. And now we're going to move on to the main portion of the talk. Which we're going to do now. So if we quit this. Yes. And let's go into our main presentation here. This is sort of an interesting sideline to my artwork. Interesting because it's more about recording museum artifacts. And this was an idea that the mad Dr. Jeff Blythe had. And I love mad ideas, you know. Sometimes the maddest ideas, the most interesting and exciting possibilities that land at your feet. So you've got to go with the mad ideas sometimes. Anyway. Jeff had an idea to record this particular image here. Well, the clock that you can see here. Now, for those of you that don't know anything about the Harrison clock. In 1649, we had a great problem in fact that we didn't understand longitude. We didn't know where we were exactly when we were traveling around the world. Simply because we didn't know the right time at a given point, in this case, Greenwich. And so the King of the Time, King George, put out a £20,000 reward to the person who could make the most accurate timepiece. And after almost the lifetime of trying to achieve the most accurate timepiece, John Harrison succeeded and won the prize. It's important because this particular artifact transformed the way we saw the world. In fact, it's the beginning of global navigation and without it, we wouldn't have global positioning satellites today. So an incredibly important piece of technology. And you know what? Even today, nobody really understands how they achieved it. Incredible. So to make a hologram of this seemed an apt idea. Now, given the fact that the particular timepiece is kept under very high security in Greenwich Observatory here, behind the plate glass, because the timepieces were £14 million, the whole idea of shining a laser beam onto this and even taking a holographic lab to Greenwich seemed bizarre. But we did, and I'm going to show you how we did. So we began by, Jeff and me, paying a visit to the museum, deciding it was possible, having the museum agree to the possibility of having the timepiece recorded as a hologram. And we went to extreme lengths to make sure that the exercise was a success. So here we see a frame, very similar to the frame that William was showing us yesterday. He's using a wooden frame. You know what? You couldn't take that into the museum and record a £14 million watch, Bill, because they wouldn't believe you were for real. It's great for teaching applications, but when you're sending yourself as sort of a professional holographer, you've got to turn up with something that looks like it's the business. So we went to extreme lengths and built this thing, and we realized that the kind of lasers that we were experimenting with were also very attractive. I got the load of a very small diode laser. It was a 160-milliwatt green diode from a German company called Plastik. The coherence length on the laser was over 20 metres. So we had the frame, we had a very small portable laser. The only thing we didn't have at the time, because we weren't working with Wilfred as closely then, or else we would have used Wilfred material, but we worked with Mike Madora. And Mike Madora took over, many of you on shore mode, Mike took over Richard Beringheider's company in Germany, and is producing plates. So we went to the museum, armed. We had the best laser in the world, we had the best frame system in the world, and we had the best holographic plates. And you know what? We were like kids. We were scared and we were excited. And you know, Jeff is a brilliant chemist, and Jeff's there in the middle, you can see him in his white coat. And Mike's the most brilliant holographer in the world, and I just worry a lot. I do the worrying. So this is a photograph of Jonathan Betts removing the watch from the security bulletproof case. Only him, only he could touch the watch. In the most attractive rubber gloves I've ever seen. So he's placing the watch inside the frame here, and there's Jeff looking very sweet in the background. Final positioning. The watch inside the frame. Okay, so we lower the lights, you know, we, the watch is in position. Mike gets the plates out, and the plate is resting less than a centimetre over this 14 million pound artifact. And I'm glad to touch it. Preparing the plates. Making sure everything is good. In fact, I think this photograph was after the exposure. And now, as the plate begins to dry, we can see that the watch was a success. Huge relief. You see how happy this man is? We didn't break the 14 million pound watch. He was very happy too. He takes the watch back, replaces it in the glass bulletproof case. And nobody knew. Now the interesting thing is, we couldn't go into the museum at night. We were sorry during the day because of the public, so we had to go in there very late at night. There was a storm outside, you know, with thunder and lightning and ravens pouring down. And we're sitting inside this dark room of this very old building surrounded by green flashing light. And I think this is just like a Frankenstein movie. If you're outside looking into the window, you know, it's like we're producing a monster. But anyway, I thought I'd give you a taster of that particular exercise. And you can all see the hologram in the hologram exhibition. Please go and see later on today. So that's my bit. Now we're running a bit short on time. And who's next? Thank you. Jack, okay. Now, any questions? So are you going to, what's, do you have some freshers to one off or are you going to make copies of that one off? Okay, thanks Steve. Sorry, yeah, I should just mention that the museum, I'm going to put it on permanent display now. We also made holograms of the inside of the clock. And that's something which the public would not normally have access to. And thinking further, you know, the clock itself has massive appeal. And one of the great fans is Neil Armstrong. So a copy of the hologram will be presented to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, to commemorate the lunar landing. So, you know, apart from the hologram being quite interesting, but actually it's quite boring, you know, because we've all seen holograms of objects before, the story and the history associated to the whole exercise is possibly more interesting. Alright. Okay, any more questions? Yes, sir. Ah, okay, now this is funny. Okay. Steve, John was asking if there was any significance in the time on the clock place. For some extraordinary reason whenever people paint pictures of clocks or take photographs of clocks, it's always 10 to 2. Have you ever noticed that? There's no absolutely no significance in the way apart from the psychological experience. But the interesting thing is, yes, please, go around. When the clock was being tested originally, it sailed with Captain Cook to the Cook Islands and then came back again and it was only 2 minutes out, it was 2 minutes late. Now I can guarantee that the hologram of the clock, when it comes back to London, will be exactly the same time. Isn't that good? Thank you. Any more? Okay, so, that corny joke, that was a joke, English joke, said we're now going to introduce it to our next speaker, Jacques, who's going to be discussing his incredible digital holograms. Thanks, Jacques. Thanks.
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On the evening of 13th March 2008, between the hours of 6:00pm and 2:00am, five reflection holograms were recorded of John Harrison’s fourth timekeeper ‘H4’, at the Royal Observatory, National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. Arguably the most important timekeeper ever made this watch finally solved one of the greatest scientific problems of its time, that of finding Longitude and marked the beginning of accurate global positioning. In recent years public awareness of the watch has witnessed an unprecedented level of popularity, together with a string of authoritative writings including the release of Dava Sobels book, ‘Longitude’, with introduction by NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong, a filmed drama adaptation and even a television sitcom ‘Only Fools and Horses’ where viewing figures reached a record twenty-four million. The watch, its history and its place in history, remain subject of fascination and curiosity. Now its journey to hologram is traced in this paper through the events of that March evening.
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10.5446/21857 (DOI)
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Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank TJ and Frank to give me a chance here to introduce some work in our group. My name is Yuan Zhun Liu. I come from the San Yat-San University in Guangzhou. Here is our university. Make some contact of our group. Okay, let's begin. Three dimension, the world attracts more and more attention nowadays, and not so previous as because I mentioned. And that's one of the reasons why we get together here. Now with the programs of technology, we can obtain the 3D data nowadays more conveniently. We can obtain the 3D data for various objects using some methods such as CT, laser scanner, image based model and so on. We can also obtain some 3D data for virtual objects using some 3D design software. Anyway, the 3D data has been widely applied in medicine, games, movies, and inverse engineering and so on. Here is still of the heat movie transformer tool. Okay, however, on the other hand, the existence to the display limits the performance of the 3D data. Lots of researchers has dedicated to the true 3D display. From lots of 3D data has been stored in the computer. The CGN stands for Generative Computer Holograms. It's one of the promising technology for true 3D display. One of the problems in CGN is the French calculation may be tight consuming. Research has tried to solve this problem from both algorithm and hardware. Most people treat the 3D object like not so self-enumerate points. Recently, some research found that we also can consider to treat the 3D object as a construction with plain-length segments. To reduce the number of the calculation element and accelerate the calculation in an inexpensive way, we use the polynomial-based method and implement it on the GPU. Okay, next, let's see such example. In the common computer graphic technique, 3D service object is presented by polygons such as triangle. Let's focus on the yellow triangle here. It is an arbitrary spatial triangle. We start with the linear sum of the depression integral and through some mathematical generation, we can obtain this formula. We proved in our paper that the project face here can be cancelled but it will not affect the final performance. The detail is described in our paper. The OH can be simplified like this. To do further mathematical technique, we can find such an analytical formulation. Here, f-delta is an analytical Fourier transform of a special right triangle. For the f-delta, it can be analytically determined. The OH can also be analytically determined. The whole 3D object field can also be analytically determined through the superposition. To achieve a better performance, some specifications to be considered. One problem may be encountered when using the analytical Fourier transform. There will be some ugly artificial visible edges in the construction. To remove these visible edges, we present a simple but useful method. We just suggest the component of a mass center of each triangle to an integral multiple of the rate length. The result is much better. We also implement our theory on the GPU to accelerate the calculation. We employ the CUDA as a programming environment which can comply the SILAC source code. Let's see some calculation of the calculation time. When the triangle is 120, we achieve the video rate. When the number of triangles increases, we can see the sediment effect by CUDA is amazing. We can run 500 faster than the serial code in CPU and 100 times faster than the MTI code in CPU. Let's begin how we calculate the situation for true lives in. First thing, we obtain the 3D data. We use the image-based modeling method to do some. First thing, we take two different aspects, digital photos like A and B here. Then we do some separation, modeling, texture mapping and so on. Finally, we obtain the 3D data of the scenes with texture. We use the numerical reconstruction to demonstrate our algorithm. Here we can see BD is consistent with the AC. Then we can also see from different view, from left to right, we can see the occlusion effect enhance the depth sensation. Here the can in the front shows the right B shot and when we see from the right, the can becomes to show the rear point. Let's focus on the can. Focus on the point. Focus on the can again. Focus on the point. It is clear that when we focus on the point, the can becomes the focus blur and that further enhance the depth sensation. Conclusion. We derived through an algorithm for CGF and propose a face adjustment technique to remove some artificial edge and use GPU to obtain a high-speed commutation. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Very interesting presentation. I think we will try to use your algorithm to increase the speed of our computation also. That's my honor. Thank you. Questions? Okay, so thank you then. Thank you for my presentation. Thank you.
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A novel method for fast generating the hologram of the three-dimensional real scene with large scene depth is presented. Analytical form solutions to the electromagnetic field of the hologram plane are given. In the framework of our theory, the object can be encoded in the Fraunhofer form and reconstructed within the Fresnel distance without lens, even it does not satisfy the far-field condition. The analytical theory can avoid using the numerical algorithm- Fast Fourier Transform, which restricts a short depth-of-field scene by the Whittaker-Shannon sampling theorem. In order to accelerate the holographic computation, we employ the GPU instead of the CPU. We found that our analytical algorithm performs tens of times faster than those of CPU.
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10.5446/21859 (DOI)
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This presentation is about hologram for Beijing 200 Olympic Games and the copyright is belongs to the Zhongcha Special Security Technology Corporation Limited. That is actually the Chinese banknote printing factory. Before take this presentation, Professor Zhang Jingfang want to show some pictures to everybody. This is Professor Zhang Jingfang. This is so called Chinese three flowers of holography. Take a photograph with Professor Xu. The three ladies names, all is Zhang Jing some what. The left one is Professor Zhang Jingfang. The middle one may be Professor Zhang Jingjiang. And another one Professor Zhang Jingjiang or something. Then three flowers of Chinese holography. This is Professor Zhang Jingfang and Danny Xu. Yeah, Zhang Jingfang and this is Kuyuxi, Danny Xu. Abandoned Professor Zhang Jingfang. Okay, it's a presentation. Brief introduction. First, you will make a brief introduction of Chinese banknote printing manufacturer. Application of holograms for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games official licensed product. Application of hologram banknotes in China. Application of hologram bank cards in China. Then the last issue will introduce our holograms in brief introduction of the and the leadership of people's banknote people's bank China and in charge of the production of legal tender operates 19 enterprises on state level technical center. 11 institutes. Optical anti counterfeiting research institutes. Approximately 30,000 staffs. This is a building of CBPM China Banknotes Printing Manufacturer. This is a new building, state level technical center for CBPM. And then the production and management that follows. Banknote printing, meaning, banknote paper making, credit card banknote printing, and meaning machinery. High purity gold and silver refining. Printing of values added taxing voice. Security bank vouchers. High level anti counterfeit certificates. Okay, so this is a production organizations. Very complicated and very strict. And the anti counterfeit label for Beijing Olympic Games. This is a ticket for Beijing Olympic Games. They just make a hologram shred here. This is one type. The second type, yeah, make a shred here. This is an open ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games. Okay, this is a hologram used for the celebrating, banknote celebrating for 208 Olympic Games. They make a hologram here. Patch. This is a shred. It's not used in the market, it's just a memory banknote. That is 10 yen. This is also a memory money for 208 Olympic Games. This is Hong Kong dollars. The Chinese bank published Hong Kong dollars. And then here, the hologram. This is also a hologram. Okay, the commemorative gold badge of celebrating for 208 Olympic Games. They make a gold coins. These are coins. They make hologram and coins. Gold coins commemorative gold. The application of hologram and banknote in China production. Production and organization. So it is the same complicated and strict. Tongtao Special Security Technology Limited, a subsidiary of CBPN, founded on December 29, 2003. Professor Chan is the head of this company. They've already so many, many commemorative banknotes of many, many kind of Chinese important day celebrations. This is the 15th anniversary of the foundation of People's Republic of China. There are both windows and three patches. Three patches here and windows here. The amount of distribution is about 60 million. And this is what the badge pattern is made. The details of the badge patterns. This is another commemorative banknote for new century. The amount of distribution is 10 billion. Hologram Magnetive Windows 3S with 5th, 30th year of RMB, 2001, 10-year of denomination issue, 205, 150, 20, 10-year of denomination issue. New holographic technologies including self-developed color-encoded, facing-coded, etc. and the counterfeiting features of public, professional, and expert levels, machine-readable magnetic characteristics. The bag, the front, 203. This is machines and products. They have electronic performing machines, wide-wave machines, and recombining machines. Always important in the firm England. Coating, metalizing, checking. And printing. They have printing machines, a receluting machine, and products. Two main final products. One is a holographic thread for banknote. And another is a hot stamping file for patches hot stamping. Applications of hologram banknote card. Before 2001, we had supplied about 10 kinds of hologram patches for commercial banks. We are an agriculture bank of China. China Post Saving Bureau, Zijiazhuang Commercial Bank, Zijiazhuang Commercial Bank, Guangzhou Bank, Jingzhou City Commercial Bank, ISBC's Anhui Branch Bank, and others. This is what they made the credit cards for so many banks. Hologram patches, this is it. Since 2001, according to 2001 number five document issued by the People's Bank of China in order to prevent the risk of counterfeit, the Yilian, named China Union Pay hologram patch is manufactured and operated exclusively by certified and designated organizations. The design, R&D, and production of the hologram patch was operated by Zhongtao Credit Card Plant, a subsidiary of the CBPM. This is a hologram of that Yilian hologram patch. There is a holographic lens to magnify the background figures. Overed anti-counterfeit features, the temple of the heaven is a stair ground, patterns at different views. Patterns is different at different viewing angles. There are two channels background and there are also holographic magnifiers, I've mentioned just now. The right, the middle, and the left, different. The right, the middle, and the right, different. The left, the middle, and the right, different. This one. Features is easy to identify, professional anti-counterfeit level, expert anti-counterfeit level, and difficult to counterfeit. Feedback from China Union Pay, no counterfeit patch has been founded since 2001. This paper is presented by Zhang Jingfang, Wang Xiaoli, Zhu Jun, etc., encoded by using long key-face only for the Chinese. Third, is there art hologram contributions? They have a pulse laser, they can make art holograms. They have a stereo, this is their stereo facilities, stereo ground facilities. These are 2D, 3D facilities, and this is reflection, this is reflection hologram, and this is for pulse hologram. Each one has 2 pulse holograms like this, nose and coys, flowers, tulips, pionies, model of the building of CBPMC, this is a pulse laser. This is a pulse hologram, rainbow hologram, stereo ground, true color dynamic stereo ground, this is what they made. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Thank you.
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The paper is composed of 5 parts. The first one is a brief introduction of China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation (CBPM). Under the direct leadership of People’s Bank of China (China’s central bank) and is in charge of the production of legal tender, CBPM has approximately 30,000 staff and operates 19 enterprises and one state-level technical center which are specialized in banknote printing, minting, banknote paper making, banknote printing and minting machinery, credit cards, high-purity gold and silver refining, printing of value-added tax invoices, securities, bank vouchers, high-level anti-counterfeiting certificates. The Optical Anti-counterfeiting Research Institute is one of 11 institutes in the Technical Center.
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10.5446/21862 (DOI)
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Okay, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Hong Jialiao and I come from the National Taiwan Normal University in Taiwan. The title of my talk today is Improved on the Uniformity of Reconstructed Outputs from Computer-Gelated Horogram with Precompressive Method. In this talk, we proposed a computer- generated hologram by using iteration Fourier transform-x reason with precompressive method. And this is outline of my talk. And this table shows the comparisons of the CGH and the transitional hologram. For computer- generated hologram, the distribution of hologram will be calculated by a computer without the optical recording. It is easy to fabricate by lithography technique. But when we fabricate the CGH by lithography technique, the limitation of the pixel size will cause the intensity distribution not uniform. So we will try to deal with it. And in this slide, this is a reconstructed system of CGH. As soon as the pixel size of the CGH pattern is one point and then the in the industry distribution of the output image is uniform. But if the dimension of the one pixel is px and py, and the industry distribution of the output image can be written as this equation. And we can see it is modified by sync function. For example, if the wavelength is 532 nanometer, the focal length is 20 centimeter and the pixel size is 90 micrometer. And then the width of the sync function is 70.7 millimeter. Here we will use IFT design CGH to see this effect. So this is a design of the decipher chart of IFT method. And we use this loop to calculate the CGH we want. This page is the computer simulation results of the CGH. The first current is the design image and this is the CGH and this is the ideal case. That means the pixel size is equal to zero. And this is the output image used spatial line much later. And we can see the industry distribution, the center is larger than the edge. So we have to do the precomposay for the image. To solve this problem, we can modify the industry distribution of the desired image and divided by the sync function before the IFT process. Then we do the same IFT loop and after the calculated and we can get the new CGH and the new output image. So we do some computer simulation and this is the original desired image and this is a new desired image and this is a new CGH and this is the output using the spatial line much later. We can see the industry distribution is more uniform. So we will do some optical experiments to check that. In this slide we set up MaxSend in the film meter to merge the optical optical of SLM. And this slide is the optical experimental result and this is the optical experimental method. And the left side is the output image without precomposay method and the right side is with the precomposay method. And we can see the industry distribution is more uniform with precomposay method. So we may do some precomposay before the CGH calculated if we get into trouble with that. And this is my conclusion. Okay, besides I will introduce talk about the activities of the Holographic Art in National Taiwan University during these three years. In 2006 we have international workshop on Holographic and spinning trade of light Holographic integration. Many professors join us and we invited Professor Yix to held event. And in 2007 we have intensive course in summer vacation. Also we invited Professor Yix to give us a course. It includes the lecture and the one-step Hologram once the rainbow Hologram experiment. And we are there are the our words for that student. And in November the University Hologram is here. It was held in Japan and this is the Hologram we met. This is a one-step rainbow Hologram with double exposure. And this is the photo is different from different view angle. Then this is year we had a course taught by Professor Yix and Professor Shea. It was about the theory of the Holographic and the experiment of two-step rainbow Hologram. Moreover we held the exhibition with student last month. And the students comes from different kind of major. So it's a special experience for them. And there are the photos of students work. And this is a this is a chance we recorded the transmission line of the object. And in this slide this photo we recorded the reflection line of the object. And the most important thing is the Professor Yix instilled her artwork to National Taiwan University last month. This is a Martin Karl rainbow Hologram. And this is a photo of her artwork. And this is a transmission type Hologram. But it's difficult to set the light source. So we put the mirror at the back sign. So we will thank Professor Yix here. That's my talk. Thank you very much. Thank you for your report and some Holographic events about NTNU. And open question. Okay. Thank you again.
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The main advantage of the computer generated hologram (CGH) is that it is easy to design and fabricate the hologram without real objects and optical system. There are few techniques to display the hologram generated by computer, such as the micro-lithographic technique or spatial light modulator. Among these two techniques, the distribution of CGH is fabricated or display in these devices which with pixelated structure. Hence, the uniformity of the reconstructed image is modified by the sinc function due to the pixelated structure of the display devices for the computer generated hologram (CGH). To minimize and compensate the uniformity, we proposed a pre-compensate method for CGH, which is designed using the Iterative Fourier Transformation Algorism (IFTA). In this contribution, the pre-compensated method for binary phase CGH will be presented. Also, the optical properties of the reconstructed image from binary phase CGH with the pre-compensate method will be discussed and compare with the reconstructed images without the pre-compensate method. In addition, the optical reconstructed system will be setup using the spatial light modulator to display the binary phase CGH, and the experimental results will be demonstrated. The uniformity of the reconstructed image with the pre-compensate method will be measured and discussed.
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10.5446/21863 (DOI)
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Today I'd like to introduce the installation work with sunlight and holography. First, a little bit about the background, and then maybe my first work, the outdoor sculpture, and also in the architectural space, and at the end I'd like to introduce using the holographic grating and sunlight into the outdoor installation work. The little bit about my background, this is my early work. The right side is my first work, it's 1978. And my interesting direction is I like very much the color of the light. This is also my early work, this 1980s. I got an artist's residence program in the Museum of Holography in New York. I made this by myself. And also these are shadow grams and multi-slit rainbow holograms. And this is also the same techniques, but also the shadow grams from the real shadow of the glass. And this one, the brushwork, only the brushwork. I am not so interested in reproducing the realistic image from the real object. I like very much the color of the light. And then the light as a pigment or ink, and maybe the canvas, the space itself. I like very much this way. And also some of my work, the installation work, and also I'm interested in the contrast. Real image and holographic images. And these are also the installation work. And then the realistic images we can feel, even we don't touch, but we can feel. And from this installation, I'd like to show the sense of sight and touch using the hologram. And these are also the installation work. And then sometimes I use not only the hologram, but also another material. This one is the DCG, Dichromated Geo-Rating Hologram. And also the dichroic mirror to put together. And then the viewer walk inside of the space, and then maybe they will meet. They will find the different color and the shadow. And also I'm interested in the effect, combination of the light and water effect. And the light source reflected on the mirror, the mirror set under the water. And the water pattern, when we drop in the cell, and then the water pattern appeared on the hologram. And this is the one document of the exhibition in Japan. And you know, maybe the reader child and the tall person, when they watch the hologram, they look different images and different colors. And this is also the scene from the same exhibition. And also I'm interested in to use the hologram as just a material to create the, maybe, plastic work, or like a decoration work. This is also experimental work that I create for the science exhibition in Tsukuba, in 1985. And then the hologram and also the light source, small halogen lamp, also hung from the ceiling. And then the whole material, the hologram and the light source, all of them are one work I would like to create. And also this is also the wall hung type decoration. And then the hologram is maybe very attractive material, like ceramic or tile for using the architectural decoration. And then especially the hologram, the maybe uncertain image, but the light color and then the people from the different viewpoints, maybe color change. These materials, not only me, I believe they're very attractive material to apply the architectural space. And this is also the architectural installation. It's a permanent display in Tokyo Institute of Technology. And this is also my early work and re-installed to the new building. And also this is experimental installation, the underground space. This is the old mine in Japan. And this is also the document, the exhibition underground space. But it's art center, the art center in Finland. The art center is the space is not old, not old something, not old cave, not natural cave. From the beginning, the people want to create the art center and dig the granite ground to build the art center. That space was wonderful. And then the holography, especially my work, the whole of the space, I'd like to say the artwork, the whole of the space artwork, not only the hologram. And the space is very important to me, and especially this kind of unique spaces. To me, it was a very, very interesting experience. And now the hologram always we need the light which we produced images. And then the sunlight is maybe most ideal light for the rainbow hologram. And then ever since I first encountered the media of the holography, my one desire has been to see it released from the world of darkened room into the bright outdoor. This is my one desire. And I'm very much interested to combine the sunlight and the hologram. And from the beginning, I was thinking to use the hologram, the outdoor. This is my first work, the very experimental works. And this work, there was a competition of the outdoor sculpture, then fortunately this idea was selected and I created these things. And then the left small pictures is the already I made the hologram, the combined the holographic images and the real object to make the whole circle. And then I followed this idea to build the outdoor sculpture. And the hologram is the rainbow hologram and the size, it's about 80 by 100 centimeters. Maybe at that time, maybe one of the biggest hologram, I believe in the world. And then behind the hologram, there's the mirror, mirror trace the sunlight and always the sun illuminates the hologram. But about this work, the people have a critical opinion because they depend on the weather, the people cannot see the images. Anyway, this is very experimental work and I like very much. But the hologram, I used the silver haroid and gelatin hologram. And then after three years, the image disappeared and then I replaced to put a new one. And then after three years, the whole works are alive, but nowadays it's imaginary work. And then at that time, I realized the silver haroid gelatin hologram is not good material to use for the outdoor. And then after that, I gave up to continue to do this way. But still I'm interested to use the sunlight. And then this one is the show window display and the face to the street during daytime, the sun into the window. And then I used the small hologram and then the image is part of the face, the eyes and mouth, nose and ears. And in the daytime, the holographic image is very bright image people can see. And then at night, of course, we add the artificial light. And then, well, still I'm thinking to use the sunlight. This interest is not involved the hologram, but with the water effect and the sunlight. And this is wall hangtime decoration. And light source, I use the sunlight, the guide from rooftop of the building and with the optical fiber to the basement. And the hologram, the image of the hologram, they produce by the sunlight. And this is also the same the artwork, the basement with the hologram and the sunlight. And then nowadays, a lot of people have to work under the basement. Even the outside is very shiny and fine days. But many people, maybe the city people have to work in the basement. And these decorations, maybe for the working people to make more uncomfortable atmosphere. And also this is the decoration of atrium. And this work combined, this is the hologram and also the dichroic mirror. And then the sun, from the ceiling, the sun come in. But the sun is not direction, it's the diffused sunlight. But depending on the time, maybe when the people stand inside of the space, they always depend on the time or depend on the weather. They find different, people have different impression from this installation. But still, I'm very much interested to the outdoor installation. And I think the 1990 mass production, the holographic rating is produced. And it's very popular and we get very easy. And then when I saw this material, I remind to maybe to, I can use it for the outdoor installation with the sunlight. And then this in the waiting put on the snow ground. And the snow ground is very bright and even the shiny day. And the outside is so bright. But still, the grating has the color, the brightness of the color has some percentage from the sunlight. And then we can see the very brilliant color even in the bright outside. And I like very much to use this material. And also, as a diffuser, I put some grating near the window. And when the sun enters the room and then the rainbow effect, we can see it on the ceiling. And I like very much this effect. And this one, I make a present for the care house, where the healthy old people live. And then there was an experimental project, a kind of art communication, and how the people, all the people reacted to see the contemporary art. And I put this, the material near the window of the restaurant. And then I think the rainbow effect on the ceiling. And then the rainbow, I think it's a very natural, one of the most natural things for the people. And then I would like people to enjoy this rainbow color. And this is my first outdoor installation I put on the pool. And then the shape is just like a cylinder and one meter high. But all the materials are the same, but they are reflected on the water. They have a different color. And also this is maybe late afternoon when the color appeared. And this installation, the color changed according to the sun movement. And also maybe from the different view point. And I like very much this effect. And also I put the same installation to the, well, I joined the exhibition in the same year at autumn. And the location is the, I don't know how to say, the part of the reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. And in this area, the monorail are troubled. And the work was set more than the 500 meter from the monorail. And the monorail, about 30 meters off the ground. And then we can see from the monorail, we can see the brilliant color on the ground from the monorail. And this is also the installation in the green area. And this one is the shape. Well, I also am involved in the exhibition. And this space location is in the old temple, it's eight centuries in old temples. And then I'm very interested, combined the very historical old atmosphere and also the very brilliant pop object. But the rainbow color is one of the natural something. And then I think the people enjoyed this kind of installation. And the shape like that, not only the grating, but also I combined the transparent plastic too. And this takes three months later and maybe the glass grown up and then the flower spread. And I like very much this landscape. And this is the object float on the water. And then when the window comes, the object move and suddenly the color change. And then this effect, only when we use the hologram, such effect happened. And, well, I speak this. And then the 2007, I have a very interesting project. The installation is exhibit at the ancient Roman ruin, the Villa di Quinti, the 2000 years ago. And the place, this is the plan and the image from Google Earth. And then I put the object like this. And then I use the 300 object. And about that. And then of course the people, the visitors, they don't know about the holography. But most people, they are very interested in when we work to prepare the approach to us and what it is. And then talk and talk. And also in this space, there is also one building, it's old building, which keep the water. And inside of the water, I set up the hologram, which is combined with the water effect. And this is the scene of the setting and the working. And this scene is after the exhibition, we have to take down. And I think these holography installations are very new artworks that involve environmental conditions. Some movement, wind and weather. In addition to the viewpoint in the outdoor sculpture, I think the holography or the material, the possibility is very high potential. But still the problem is that we have to improve the durability. I hope the most scientists and engineers are interested in to research these topics. Thank you.
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Installation with sunlight and holography, as environmental art, is presented. I exhibited the out door installation with holography at Villa dei Quintili where is located in the remains of ancient Roma in 2007. My first outdoor artworks involving hologram was created in 1979. In the white light reconstruction hologram, a direct sunbeam is the ideal reconstructing light source. In sunny weather, a hologram reconstructs bright images, irrespective of the brightness during the day. On the other hand, during cloudy or rainy weather, there is no image because scattered light does not reconstruct the image. Sunlight opens a hologram from darkroom and artificial illumination. The out door works with holography involved sunlight changes in response to the influence of the weather and time. Such work that changes in response to environment surrounding a work, natural environment and especially the sunlight, presents a completely new concept to environmental art field. In this paper, I describe several practice of installation with sunlight and holography that I had done until now.
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10.5446/21871 (DOI)
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In the last paper we just saw, Dr. Chew mentioned this stuff to get Methanine Blue Dichromated Gelatin more sensitive called TMG, Touch of Methylgrindin, which is the stuff I discovered in the 1980s when I wanted to make people able to coat their own DCG, but with a helium-nion laser. In those days there were no laser diodes and they could then coat their own DCG and have a reasonable chance of success with a helium-nion laser because it made it more sensitive. So I was very pleased to discover this aiming that helped do that, but I had to do quite a bit of research to find the best aiming that would enable me to do this and only TMG was suitable for gelatin. So there were other things I discovered at the time which were marvelous for making Methanine Blue fade with red light, but I couldn't use them in the gelatin because they involved the use of a stuff called EDTA, Ethylene Diamine Tetraecetic Acid, which is a very famous complexing agent for heavy metals and if you put that in with the gelatin it takes the chromium out and will cause the collapse of your chromium gelatin structure. So although it was very, very good, I couldn't use it. So I put it on the shelf thinking, well maybe I could use that one day. Then I went on to find a way to help people coat silver halide emulsions much more easily than doing it the more difficult way of traditional way. So to do that I found a way of getting very nice silver halide polygrams. They were bright, they did have defects because you just coat the gelatin yourself and the way that worked was simply to coat down gelatin layers in the light, no photosensitivity at all and then in safe light conditions you soak in silver nitrate, then you soak in potassium bromide and you soak in dye and the whole lot becomes photosensitive and you can record holograms and the microscopic grain structure was found to be extremely good, around 10 nanometers with the TEM microscope. So transmission electron microscopy proved that it was a great idea. So having helped people to do the amateur, to do dark-matte gelatin with the helium, to do their own silver halide, I thought for this symposium it would be great if I could do this photopolymer business that doesn't require any treatment, it just is there immediately after exposure. Well I thought about this last year and knowing that this symposium was coming up, it turns out that I rather bit off more than I could chew. Because I restricted myself to having hydrophilic systems, unlike the photopolymers that are becoming available, the dew-poly material has long since been withdrawn from being able to be used and exposed by the public. So there's a challenge, I thought wouldn't it be nice if people could cut their own. But I had to make it hydrophilic so that it didn't involve some quite difficult, organic substances. Well what's so difficult about that is that the whole principle of making that kind of system is that when the photopolymer is made, first of all it's got a polymeric matrix to carry materials to allow it to flow through like a sort of a plasticizer and then where the bright fringes are in the fringe structure as you're exposing it, it becomes polymerized. So the monomer becomes polymerized and where the monomer becomes polymerized it shrinks and that shrinkage has got to be replaced by more material. So it can build up during the exposure, it can encourage more material in. So between the light and dark fringe structure you can get a redistribution and a polymerization occurring. Now what you want ideally is a high refractive index where you've got the light fringes and low refractive index with the dark fringes so that you get good fringe contrast. And when you're using organic hydrophobic materials like dupeau stuff and probably male stuff coming, the bear stuff coming out later, you've got hydrophobic materials essentially and when you've got those materials you've got the luxury of being able to have phenol groups with the pi electron ring structures which slow light down when it passes through films of benzene rings with the big pi electrons structures. It slows the light down and puts the refractive index up and another thing you can do is put heavy atoms in there like bromine attachments. That also slows the light down. So when I try and do that sort of thing with hydrophilic polymer you can't get away with it because it loses its water sens, its water solubility and there's a conflict there. Now you can use aromatic systems that have got nitrogen atoms in but there's nothing available that I found. These are more soluble in water but there's nothing out there that I've managed to track or even make myself that will do that. So maybe I'm trying to do the impossible to match the dupeau material so I can't do that but I have managed to get as far as having a photopolymer you can expose. You can see it immediately but you've got to stick to the normal typical thing, bright coins and we want something better than that. So that side of it is work in progress. It could be that it's not possible because you've got to pack in a lot of monomer to get your photosensitivity. It could be that it's not possible to do this with a rather hydrophilic system. You may but there are certain aspects that mean that I'm getting somewhere with it so it is work in progress but by cheating I have managed to get a high diffraction efficiency. I do this cheating because I've used a chemical H2O so by cheating I've managed to do it. Now what I've got here is a very photosensitive to the red material that you can expose with a helium neon laser or indeed one of these little laser diodes. These sort of things, these sort of things, these are remarkable because they are so cheap and yet if you cut the end off you can make very, very nice and you can make little holograms so very well with them. They work much better than much more expensive big ones because they are much more like TM00 mode. Currently they're not strictly TM00 but if you, I'll show you how I do that but it does work. So there we have it. I will now show what happens. The idea is that people could cut their own photopolymer down for educational purposes and then expose it themselves and give it this water treatment and then they would see their hologram appear. So we'll have a look at how that works in real time. I've got this recorded here. But now here's, right, now there is a sheet of paper on a board with some microscope slides batted up to each other and the microscope slides, because I'm using a material that contains not gelatin but polyvinyl alcohol. I have discovered that this very fast sensitivity to red light is marred by putting it in gelatin. It's also marred by putting it in polyacrylamide. So for some reason the AMIDE groups I think spoil this very rapid photo sensitivity. So therefore I have had to use another polypolymer that doesn't contain AMIDE groups. I've used the harmless polyvinyl alcohol, one that is readily obtainable commercially manufactured on a huge scale, Mobile 385, which is a low molecular weight polyvinyl alcohol. And because I'm using that, when you coat that down with a male bar, as I'll show you in a moment, the fact that I've got these glass slides batted up to each other, the stuff doesn't run in between the slides as it would do with gelatin. So because it's got a high surface tension, it's quite convenient from that point of view. So there's my special goo, the formulation and how actually to make it is going to be in the proceedings. I pour it down there. This is a male bar, which is a closely wound bar with about eight turns per centimeter. This is done under red, under safe light, green safe light. And I then show how I draw it down. And then I hair dry it. Not too much. It's got to retain some moisture. On the other hand, if I retain too much moisture, then the fringes become unstable while they're recording. So although it's very light sensitive and you could record photographic evidence of sensitivity, the fringe structure needs a certain degree of dryness, otherwise you get what I call fringe fluidity occurring when you expose. So you've got to get that drying just about right, sort of touch dry, but not overdry or you kill the surface sensitivity. Now there's an object I use for my test piece, a small hologram, three Chinese coins with three aspirin on them. Now the aspirin are important because if you've just got low diffraction efficiency, the aspirin will only be dark shadows on the coins and that won't do. This really shows up that you've got good diffraction efficiency. So I'm suggesting a simple thing like this. Perhaps students would like to do something more interesting than aspirin on coins, but you do need to put coin in somewhere in case all else fails as you holographers know well. So now here's a piece of film where I have exposed the material. I'll show in a moment how I did that, but this is the plate here and you don't see really anything. You could if you inspected it strongly before you do this, you would see something, but this is going to go into a typical disposable laboratory, rain boat, which is black instead of white. So these things are very, very cheap. Now this is in real time, so you drop it in and you watch it come up. Now what's going on here is that the fringes that have not got a lot of polymer in them, the dark fringes are taking in water and that is reducing the refractive index of the dark fringes so that the dark fringes are getting their refractive index lowered towards that of water while the light fringes, the light struck fringes are not taking in so much water. So that's increasing the fringe contrast and it gets really quite nice and bright. That's... Now I'll give it a minute to do that again. Just a moment. Here you can see what the angle of the asprings are. You can see the asprings are white, well would have been white if they... You can see the asprings are showing up. Now if you don't get aspring or a white diffusing surface doing that then you have not much diffraction efficiency. So now how to do it with the light... I suggest that students could have... These pointers are so cheap once you cut the end off. They are completely safe. It's absolutely impossible to do any harm. The ones I try to get are about three milliwatts. Don't get those special European standards one milliwatts. It's pretty awful. So you then put it in a vise and you just cut the end off like that. After you've taken the batteries out and put the end in so that when you clamp it in the vise it doesn't all flush up. You just saw the end off. Then inside the back part of it there's this spring thing and you want to put a... You want to put a crop clip on that that's got insulation around it like this. So there's insulated crop clip going inside. Try and make the discipline to always use red wire on the positive side so the outer casing is positive. Make that a discipline with your students. Red is positive. And then you connect that to the equivalent of the button batteries but bigger size because you've got to leave this thing on for about ten minutes to stabilize before you make your hologram. So you connect it up like that to a four and a half volt battery and that you leave on for about ten minutes before you shoot at least because you need to get stability. And this sort of battery will give you a really long go. If you use button batteries they will keep... They will lose power. You haven't got enough capacity with button batteries. So there's... You can see you've got this nice clean bar of light. So I'm suggesting that a whole class of students could have their own setup with a little shroud and they put their own hologram... They make their own hologram in this photopolymer that could be made by... Well, probably it would have to be made by the lecturer beforehand. But the good students would enjoy making it themselves. So the essence of this one is not a terribly bad monomer. Most monomers... You should always handle monomers until they're polymerized. We gloves anyway. This is the main constituent apart from polyvinyl alcohol. That is from the Sigma Aldridge website. You can see it is acryl oil. It's got two active acrylate groups there and there. So it is a cross-linking monomer, which is what you want because it really shrinks. The bad thing about it is that it's only got a refractive index of 1.46, which is typical of the problem because when that is polymerized, there's not much difference between the refractive index of the basic monomer and the polymerized stuff. So that's the problem. That's why I have to cheat and use water to bring it up. Now, I should also say that these are somewhat ephemeral holograms in that they disappear. I mean, if you take them out of water, they will go. So I'm afraid that this is holograms for your aquarium. Well, it makes a change from having to keep water out of dichromated gelatin at all costs. You don't need to keep it in this one. So that's what it's made of. And the proceedings tell you how to mix this up. So that's the empirical view of the stuff. Methadine-based acrylamide, as you see in the small quantity there, that gives extra stability to it. And this is a well-known cross-linker used on a vast scale for genetic fingerprinting with polyacrylamide gels. So all these materials, I'm glad to say, are cheap. Now, to make the polyvalent alcohol wet the glass, I have had to use methanol. That's not so bad. So that's the one organic solvent I've had to use. And also, surprisingly, that glycerol diacrylate stuff that I just showed you here, that stuff, you would think that was pretty water soluble with 3OH groups there. Very surprisingly, it's annoyingly disappointing in its water solubility. I think the trouble is that these OH groups make the stuff bend round and it forms an internal hydrogen bond. It's very viscous stuff. But once you make a 50% solution of it in methanol, it's nice and runny. So these things combine with each other internally, and I think that spoils its water solubility. But once you've broken that up, it is water soluble in effect. So, doethylene glycol, a nice humectant, is in there. That's important because that helps to carry unexposed material into the growing fringe site. Incidentally, I used to think that this whole business of having the duphold stuff have diffusion going on when exposing, was going to undermine the fringe structure. You sort of intuitively feel that, wouldn't you? Well, when you think about it, what really goes on there is that the diffusion is taking place equally on both sides of the bright fringe. And that means that the center point of the fringe is staying in the right place. So it's maintaining its spatial integrity. So it does stay in the same place. It doesn't spoil the actual fringe arrangement. So it is not a self-destructing process because both sides of the fringe are pulling in material. So I think this is going on with what I've got here, but it's not a sufficient, this is not sufficient, this particular formulation to actually produce a satisfactory result without using the water trick. Now, I do have another formulation, but I haven't, I don't want to present it here because there might be a patentition involved. And in any case, this is a real do-it-yourself thing if you'd like to have a go. So that's it. And there will be more details in the conference proceedings. Right.
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The author has been researching methods to produce a practical water-based photopolymer hologram recording system under red or green laser light. The remarkable ability of the dye methylene blue (MB) to fade to its colourless form under red light in the presence tertiary amines has been known for many decades. The author discovered during the 1980’s that this process could be much enhanced my incorporating the dye into a hydrophilic polymer that did not contain amine or amido groups ( as for example occur in gelatine and polyacrylamide), and also by including two tertiary amines with opposite charges. The author has now recently discovered how to use this system with a specific difunctional monomer mixed with polyvinyl alcohol, it has proved possible to make a coated glass sheet to record remarkably bright Denisyuk holograms for classroom demos with 633nm light with power as low as 7 mj/cm2 using nothing more than light and water as a post exposure treatment.
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10.5446/21872 (DOI)
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Hello everyone, I am Narepa, I am going to start a presentation. Hello everyone, I am very happy to have an opportunity to give this presentation to you today. Please don't be surprised, I can hardly speak and hear you. So I have come to give this presentation after writing down what I intend to say on paper and recording it. I think this will help to deliver what I want to say to you more clearly. Also, I would like to seek your understanding about my presentation. First, I will give you a presentation about reinterpretation of spectrum, painting in colors by rainbow control. This presentation will introduce to you a painting process using rainbow hologram and a hologram setup method that enables us to paint works much easier using die stuffs and brushes. I graduated from the Department of Arts in Korea National University of Arts and studied hologram there. After graduating KNUA, I entered the engineering facility of Gwang-un Graduate School and studied optical science. I am now studying digital hologram and 3D display, research center for a master's degree. This is the concept of the study. First of all, I will explain the painting of light in a brief overview and then introduce to you rainbow holograms, paintings and holograms, followed by rainbow colors that are important in hologram paintings. And then I will introduce to you my work of hologram painting, the reinterpretation of light. I am gratifying various kinds of arts or genres as well as hologram painting. And among them, I want to speak about hologram design and installation of art. Finally, I will give a presentation about digital hologram art and then do the same thing about digital hologram work that I am now doing in 3D RC. The painting of light is a type of work of which many painters have been dreaming for a long time. In order to express the light as it is, all painters have been trying to have the sun, the stars and all kinds of lights in nature come out of space by all means. These are mural paintings of Altamara Cave, which are the origin of painting in human history. Primitive men could express their own features and animals on the mural paintings by lighting the inner space in the dark cave using torches. This is a holy picture that was drawn before the Renaissance age. Its background and halo are colored in gold. This depicts a very holy expression. And Saint Mary and Jesus are covered with gold powder and foil to produce light therefrom. In this drawing, we can notice the painter's effort to produce light like a luster. This is a part of the creation by Michelangelo, which expresses the creation of the sun and moon. On the right and left side, you can see the sun and moon. Producing a strong image of the shining round sun, which is especially prominent. Also, we can feel Michelangelo's effort to express the shining sun and moon in this work. I think that if I express this work, the creation, in the form of a hologram, it would produce a fantastic feeling. I've been thinking of expressing the creation by using such a hologram. This is Rembrandt's work, Philosopher and Meditation, which expresses a strong light on the window. In fact, very strong. Light from the window expresses a mysterious feature of the philosopher and meditation with the light surrounding the man. Light creates a mysterious feeling about the picture. An Impressionist, Monet's works express the possible characteristics of light well by mixing die-stuffs. Focusing on expressing how things look different, depending on light, rather than the things themselves. In his works, for example, Sunrises, he expresses the light of fog and the feeling of the sunrise as if it came out from the work themselves, jumping right out at you by adding or reducing the amount of die-stuffs. Then, if we could choose the colors of light and draw pictures, instead of doing it by choosing those of die-stuffs, it would make very beautiful paintings, very beautiful as paintings of light. If we choose any one color among various colors dispersed from prism and mixing another color with it, it would eventually be a work like a painting of light. Both yesterday and today, painters have had a dream of drawing such works as paintings of light. We can now express those works, such as paintings of light, by using rainbow holograms. The Rainbow Hologram was invented by Dr. Steve Benton. As in the figures, I first recorded object ray of the slit along the criteria ray on the hologram. Through restoration works, observers can see rainbow colors with the slit because of the dispersion of light. They can see restored rainbow colors under their very noses, together with visible radiation areas from red to violet by moving them up and down vertically. I applied this method to this work and carried out this painting of light using rainbow as colors. Hologram usually has a different feeling depending on the methods of recording, three-dimensional objects, or two-dimensional ones. A. Where I recorded three-dimensional figures on holographic films, there was a change of phase contrast because of a feeling of volume and features of objects. Therefore, you can see a feeling of solidity because of this change of phase contrast through this restoration work. But B. In case of the image that was drawn on a two-dimensional image or on paper, there was not the change of phase contrast between films because it had no feeling of volume. You can feel a restored image as if it were a three-dimensional image, adding up with a feeling of space inside a two-dimensional image in holographic films. If we put any penetrated two-dimensional image right before holographic films, there would be no change of phase contrast, and therefore we can draw features and colors on them, just like normal paintings. As I stated above, I would like to introduce to you the rainbow hologram again. I restore one rainbow that is positioned on the other side of B, or I will restore. Then, observers can see one color depending on their positions. If I move the position of a slit, the rainbow would restore to the position A in the same way. Also, if I move the position of the slit into the position C, rainbow would restore to the position C as well. If observers looked at the positions A, B, and C at the same time in a fixed position, they could see the ranges of violets and blue because those ranges of blue and violet ranges of the position A at the bottom would be overlap with those ranges of red and orange color of the position B. They can see yellow and green colors because the position B in the middle cannot be affected by the rainbow of the positions A and C. If the position C didn't overlap with the rainbow position B, or if the rainbow position C didn't come into the eye of the observers, they can see red and orange colors. I could color the rainbow in this hologram painting work noticing that we can see colors differently depending on the possible positions of a slit. This is a setup method for performing hologram paintings. This setup method was designed for painters to carry out works at the same environment as an existing painting works. In existing painting works, we draw pictures on an easel or desks with paper, and in the same way I designed it in order to carry out painting works on an optical table by putting holographic films on it. It doesn't move previously drawn paintings to hologram as in normal paintings. The next picture shows my hologram lab. I personally made the optical table similar to an optical table model that is already being sold, but it has no vibration and is excellent in dust proofability. Also because it is fairly stable, I could set it up to perform hologram paintings in a real time setting. For performing hologram paintings, I set up the table to draw paintings on the optical table by putting holographic images or films on it to be set vertically with the optical table, and not by setting it up horizontally with it. Laser beam is separated from the beam splitter, and one is toward the reference beam, and the other is toward the cylinder lens. The cylinder lens makes the line beam to adjust itself to extension, plate, and slit holes at the bottom. I came to work out hologram film on the optical table with the shutter closed, covered transparent plate on it, and performed painting works with die stuff and brushes as if I had covered holographic films with masks. At that time, I could use various painting techniques. I made masks using various techniques such as a feeling of brush touch and knife techniques, and then I opened the shutter and had it exposed. At that time, I could add up colors using rainbow hologram. If I wanted to add up another color, I could continue performing painting works, moving the slit along with line beams. Although it was difficult to adjust the positions of the slit to add up colors and accurately choose the colors to use, I will study more for improving it. I made works using hologram paintings with the above mentioned set setup method. I made a work by putting a thick acrylic plate on films, exposing it many times and composing it in a square form. With this basic work, the composition work B was born. I made this by covering it with masks in a square form. With respect to A, I performed hologram painting works with knife techniques using die stuffs on hologram films. You can see various colors among lines drawn by the knife because I took rainbow holograms many times. Work B is an abstract one, and I sprayed die stuff with net, exposing the rainbow hologram three times. These works will play an important role in preparing for a foundation for performing hologram paintings. This is an abstract work that was made with three brush touches and three rainbow hologram exposures. I could do this in hologram paintings just as I drew the picture quickly with a large brush using die stuffs on canvas and paper. When observers look at the hologram at a time, they can see three rainbow holograms at the same time. However, if they move it up and down vertically, they can also see different colors. This is a work named Men and Women's Meeting, which expresses many men and women who are wandering about the city. It expresses a feeling of brush touch, put with color as well. I colored the background using knife techniques. Observing it move on the left and right horizontally, you can see people in the background come and go back and forth. This work is named People of Light. Four people are shining green and blue and red colors are shining in the background as well. I really like to paint people, observe various people's features, especially their spirits. I wanted to express these into light, so I painted many works of global people. This is a hologram design work. I made a hologram design suggestion to the Korea Design Foundation and was chosen as a designer in December. My hologram lighting design was exhibited at Namsan Tower Design Cube in Seoul. Incandescent lamps were beautiful with beautiful rounded curves that are in danger that they will get behind by LED and disappear in the near future. Therefore, I restored incandescent lamps into projective holograms and everybody can see familiar incandescent lamps attached on the wall, not hung on the ceiling, from which light comes out in holograms. And if it is hung on the wall and lighted by restoration ray, this design work can produce a mild atmosphere all around the room while those hologram incandescent lamps are shining. The figure A shows the exhibition in Namsan Tower Design Cube. The work B is a hologram lighting design work. It shows as if incandescent lamps were shining in the air. Also, I attempted to apply hologram to public art and I am awarded in a Seoul Public Art Show. As a part of these works, I installed the work titled, As Shoot the Hope in Plaza in front of Seoul Station. It expresses a glowing flame with embossing hologram and symbolizes the shooting of wish and hope towards sky at night with green laser lighting. By attaching embossing hologram inside of acrylic cylinders, the embossing hologram shows beautiful rainbows in daylight and also displays bright rainbows by lighting at night. Its work had received a lot of interest from people with an emitting rainbow and various laser beam shots to the sky. In addition, studies shall be continued on how to make the hologram show better in the open air. At present, I am studying 3D image in 3DRC of Graduate School of Engineering. In particular, I am studying digital hologram using CGH. Although there are many contents to study CGH in terms of engineering, there are not so many studies on digital hologram in terms of art. I recognize the need of studies for digital hologram art in our study. There is a good example in digital hologram art, which is a fringe printer. The fringe printer is to print a fringe pattern generated by computation from a digital image on a hologram medium. While the stereo hologram technique is a method to show 3D shapes by integration of 2D images, the fringe printer technique has a great advantage that it is possible to record and display them in complete 3D image. Through the fringe printer, it is possible not only to make a plate type hologram work, but also to create a 360 degree hologram and a disc hologram. In addition, it is possible to make 360 degree color rainbow hologram, wherein a film printed by the fringe printer was covered on a cylinder and made seen in colors from 360 degrees. This showed a good example to complete existing methods to make the 360 degree hologram and facilitate creating 360 degree color rainbow holograms. Besides, a disc hologram, which is a disc shaped hologram able to be seen from any direction, can be made also with the fringe printer. These methods show good examples to apply the fringe printer to digital hologram art. My digital hologram study. These are results from my digital hologram study in 3D RC. As to the picture A, I converted 3D graphics that I made into CGH and then restored it into 4-year hologram as in the picture B. Regarding the picture C, I could make a short or long distance restoration through image fiber in order to freely search for restored 4-year hologram images everywhere. Therefore, we can find out that there is a restored part at the end of the image fiber. Also, we can make out how freely we can see the restored CGH. The picture D shows the figure of the experiment setup. The picture A shows the figure of the experiment setup. The picture B shows the figure of the experiment setup. The picture A shows the figure of the experiment setup. The picture B shows the figure of the experiment setup. The picture A shows the figure of the experiment setup. American Sign Language is one of the languages giving the greatest help to communication of the hearing impaired person. In order to deliver information for the hearing impaired person rapidly and easily, American Sign Language images may be included in the screen. Among methods to generate American Sign Language holograms, a method using spatial redundancy has a demerit to take a long time in generating American Sign Language holograms and computing them. However, the lookup table method to call pre-made and stored points in space in generating hologram was used as lookup table method to call restored Sign Language data in generating hologram in order to allow calling American Sign Language in scripts and subtitles. In this study, in ASL proper noun, hologram 2009 were tested. As results, it was found that the lookup table which has stored Sign Language data in advance and then call them in generating hologram brought 393 time-improved results than the existing method. The results also showed that it would be possible to generate more effective hologram Sign Language images in 3D TV in the future. I showed you some applications of hologram to various genres of arts, especially setup methods and work processes to make hologram paintings as well as my own works. I think these methods would be a big help for painters who have been dreaming of the painting of light. As in the pictures, I expect there will be many painters who perform painting works using holographic films as a canvas. If digital hologram would show up in the near future, painters could freely add up various colors into the air and draw pictures. While there are many studies about digital hardware, we need further algorithm studies for digital hologram arts. I am now studying this. Developing digital hologram technology would be much more help for digital hologram painters. Existing methods are difficult to make, so I hope I could help those hologram painters to perform their works more easily, and there will be much more hologram artists. Also, I wish to make our world beautiful with this hologram light. That's because light is hope. Thank you very much.
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This paper introduces the work ‘the color of light‘ or ‘the painting of light’ by rainbow control which uses rainbow holograms. Usually paintings are made with colored paints and they are seen with light. However we cannot experience the true colors of light. The artist paints rainbow holograms on the film directly as in real painting, creating a variety of colors like dyes. Rainbow holograms have red, green, and blue light which can be mixed to create additional colors. The artist paints, with light, on the film directly, making rainbow holograms. This is done instead of making a hologram of an existing work, so the work is more vivid and immediate. The process makes forms like paintings and adds colors on them. There was an exhibition, titled ‘Reinterpretation of spectrum’, in Seoul Korea from December 26, 2008 to January 17, 2009 showing these works. In addition there was a holography workshop. This paper introduces rainbow holograms, how to mix colors of light using rainbow control, and the set-up for making small and large holographic paintings.
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10.5446/21873 (DOI)
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Here again, the title is it and I also provide URL and save your canals as my site. And first of all, this is the same slide as I showed in the last video. I think we have a second world in Japan about the research on the holograph video. Okay, so this is the percentage of the presentation at the 3D image components which include any kind of 3D magic. And this shows the percentage of the program it created presentation. So it was around 20% many years, the last two years, in 2000 I'm made and this year. So the percentage is suddenly up to 45%. And the recent research in Japan is the real-time holograph. Okay, so here shows the example. The holograph video created one, I think. And the real-time holograph from integral photogram in this and the real-time generation, this has real-time and lookup table for past calculation and viewing zone and measurement and full color and scanning display. So I will introduce these researches briefly. Since I want to introduce many researches, I just briefly give my information. And in the proceedings, I made a reference list so you can, if you are interested in, you can check. You can have a paper in the town. Okay, so past topic is the program for real-time object. So the research at NICD National Institute of Information and Communication Technology are working with NHK. NHK is a Japan Broadcasting Corporation. And what they did is the real-time holograph and combative IP is as integral photography. So you use a lens array to take a rubber wax image. Then they combative this IP image to program with hardware in real-time. This is how the integral photography works. So the... Okay, here shows the concept of the IP. So this is one-dimensional, but actually we have two-dimensional lens array. And each lens acts as a small camera. So this is something similar to the stereo ground. But the... so each parameter image has a different view of the object. Then, okay, usually this image is recorded on the film or captured by a device and used to reconstruct the image. But in this case, they capture the lens array and here is a high-election camera and object. So they make an integral photograph like image on the camera. So they capture the image to be seen and the captured image is sent to the hardware. So here shows the photograph of the hardware. It has a full DSP, institutional processing units. And in fact, as a FF team, first-person transform process, active algorithm. So each IP image is converted into something like a holographic stereo ground with full parallax. So, okay, this is the... a photograph of the IP camera. So here is... this is lens array and this is high-election camera. And here is the object. And this is reconstruction from the holograph generated in the airtime. And, okay, if you want this image is drawn because the focus is on this card. So this image is a focus. So next topic is engaging with the drone. Increase the horizontal viewing zone angle of the program by distribution, redistribution of spatial-like motor vehicle. This research is done by Professor Yasio Takagi, and he is a student at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. I'm afraid my computer is crazy. Come on. Actually, the print's probably something complicated, but let me explain. Okay, here shows the so-called OF optics. So if you have an image, here is a clear frame and then image frame again. And they put the S-M here and also they put the four point sources. So four point sources is combative four, collimated beam, which has a different direction. So this lens has a Fourier transform of S-M here. So here we get four images of Fourier transform of S-M here, and the vertical position and the horizontal position is shifted. And in the S-M, they put a program pattern of four different programs. And so this program is the same, but the vertical position is shifted, and so they went straight. So this program 1, 2, 3, 4 is re-alleged as 4, 3, 2, 1. So it is equivalent. So increase horizontal pixel number, of course decreasing vertical pixel number. So we can increase horizontal building angle four times. Of course we reduce the vertical building angle one force. So this is the concept of the image, the photograph of the concept of the image of the display. So the display has a recovery, okay, so forth. Original pixel is 4K by 2K, but it's combative to 16,000 by 500. So building angle in horizontal is 15 degrees. It's enough for a bi-mocular observation. And we are also doing similar thing in different way. Our way is much more simple. What we do is we just want to reconfigure the pixel number like this. And what we do is we use mirror, center of mirror. So here is the hologram, and we illuminate light, and the light hits on the mirror, so vast mirror diverges the light. Then we have second mirror to align, so we are okay. So the virtual hologram is reshaped as a much more horizontal pixel and less vertical pixel. And this is our setup. We have two sets of mirror. This is the concept of the image, so we reconfigure 4K by 2K pixel to 8K by 1K. So of course, as I said, building zone is dark and original. Okay, next topic is color display. This is hard work. Usually, color display, people use the 3SLM and combine them into single optical axis. In the conventional project, they have optics which separate white light into RGB and also combine separated color to single beam. So we just use optics originally built in the project. So what we did is we just removed high pressure, high power lamp, and put white light LED. Okay, so the light is divided into green and also red-blue, and this prism act as a... This is very interesting. It acts as a polarizer and also the dichrome... I don't remember. It's separate color. So I calculate green, red, blue, 3CGH, then the light is instant and the reflected light is combined. So we can see the color image from here. So this is a projector, just commercially available projector, not a broken projector. We modified the projector so we can see the reconstructed image here. So this is a photograph of the reconstructed image. Okay, and this is original data, CG data, and it is reconstructed image, photograph of reconstructed image. And here I... hopefully, it's moving. Yeah, we are also working first calculation. So this is... of course, this is movie, but originally it's calculated on the personal computer in real time. So I want to move next topic. Next idea is color system. So the professor Sato at the University of Hyogo is working on the temporal multiplex color display. And also they also develop the color camera, color photographic camera. So here they use three RGB lasers and here is his object. And this is CCD camera with color filter. And this is display. So there is a single L-course with synchronized temporal multiplexing light. So it's time sequential RGB, RGB, and makes the color image. This is photograph of their hologram, also taken by their holographic camera. Okay, so this is... I think this is last topic. Anyway, this is new horizontal parallax only display. Horizontal parallax only display is... the MIT system is very famous as HPO system, but professor Takaki and his group proposed new HPO system. They are using high-speed SLM, which is DMD. And... okay, this is their system. They use very high-speed SLM. And only... it scans horizontal only. They enlarge in vertical. So this is just enlarged image of the SLM. And also they demagnify the SLM in horizontal and scan this elemental hologram only horizontally. So the scanning speed is very slow. And they... the DMD frame rate is 13.3 kiloframes per second. So they can put 220 elemental holograms at the rate of the 60 frames, 60 holographic frames per second. This is the photograph of reconstructed image from their system. Okay, in conclusion, for practical holographic video display, I think now the cost does matter. So we can technically make it, but the cost is a problem. And I believe horizontal parallax only is more practical. And the measure breakthrough on SLM is required, particularly for the full parallax holographic television. And the... today I only introduced display, but holographic data transmission storage and the computations are also important. Okay, that's it. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.
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Around 1990, researches on the electro-holography or the holographic video display had become very active in Japan. One of the reason might be that fine liquid crystal panels for television became commercially available. Another reason might be that the researchers were encouraged by the success of the holographic video display research at MIT. Recently, researches on holographic video display are getting very active again, though the goal is still challenging. This paper describes recent research activities on the holographic video system in Japan. It includes hologram calculations and acquisitions as well as displays.
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10.5446/21875 (DOI)
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My name was Phong and I was adopted by another village, also Phong, and later I was adopted for the second time. That's when I got my name, Jim. Okay. But it's curious to me that I left when I was 16 years old in 1948, and now I'm back home. And another curiosity is that I decided to become a teacher when I was 14 years old, because those of us in the village of 500 people and only 20 students cannot afford the tuition of about 100 kilograms of rice. That's what you pay for one year of education in the village. And there are only 20 students from 6 years old to 12 or even 18 years old, one room in the village, and one teacher for all grades. So that's how I grew up. And there are only three subjects. One is mathematics, which is the apacus. The other one is memorizing Chinese literature. Just memorize. You don't understand it. It's okay. Just recite, sing it, poetry, and so forth. And calligraphy. We have the right down all the memorize, and that's the whole curriculum. For everybody, no matter how old or how young you are. So, and on and off, we have war, we have famine, we have droughts, we have floods, we have Japanese invasion, and we have Russel revolution. So we go to school when we can. Okay. But when I was 14, something important happened to me. Our teacher, only one teacher, was sick, and he asked me to teach the class. So, but I really enjoyed the poetry and I enjoyed everything. So I liked to teach it. And after I taught it, that week, whenever other students beat me in the street, they bowed to me and they clean some door, and they show some little teacher. I liked it so much, I decided, I am going to be a teacher, no matter what else I do. So after all my education, and I learned horography, and I came to China and taught professors. In America, I taught professors. Those are easy things to do. Because professors are prepared, they want to learn, they are even paid to come to learn. But recently, after I retired in 1970, 1997, I want to teach children again. And my most interesting and most difficult challenge in my life is to teach children very young, six years old, so forth. Not horography, horography is only an instrument. I use horography to make them understand much more about everything, about art, about poetry, and about life. So I started teaching parochial school assembly programs. Those are private schools in the United States, maybe 100, 200 students. And when I gave an assembly, all of them sit on the floor in a gymnasium with the 18 year olds holding the 6 year old on their lap so that they would not run away, would volunteer parents and teachers sitting on folding chairs around to keep the young children from running and screaming and making noise. That is the hardest job in my life. So I have come in a circle. I started in China in a one room class with all children of all ages and now I am back to teaching children young in one room. So in fact, I have to invent new ways of teaching. How do you keep children still for 40 minutes talking about Fourier transforms? I am going to try to do that. I am going to assume you are children, okay? So don't be insulted if I am too easy on you, okay? So the way I spot my class is, this is what I do. I brought something very heavy, but I didn't have to check it in the airline. So you are children and I am just now coming into the gymnasium and you are going to hold still for 40 minutes, okay? You look like 6 years old. You look like 6 years old, right? What did I just brought out? Nothing. I brought another 6 year old. What do you think I just brought out? Air. And all the children say molecules. And all the students say, anything matter. And then an 18 year old says, don't matter. And I say all of you are correct, but you missed the most important thing I just brought out here. I took out my cell phone and I put it into my block of space. Suddenly they get the idea. Information. What I have here is information. With my cell phone, I can communicate with the world. I can Google and find out anything I want. In fact, my hero physicist who died last year at age 98, John Wheeler, he said, the universe has nothing, nothing but information. Everything else is incidental. So you think about molecules, antimatter, tell me more about it. It's more information. It's information. This is the age of information. Now, the next thing I would do is I want to show you how much information I can put in this block of space. What is space? You see, the afternoon after I give this assembly, I would meet with the smartest students for two hours. I would do different things. But we have to conclude what is space? From talking to a lot of children, I come up with space is that which can hold information. That's the definition of space. What is time? Time is that which can change the information you're holding. Therefore, you cannot have time without space. You must have information to change. So the next thing I do is I just blend out the instochin next. Let's figure out something really, really interesting. How much information is in this block of space? How much? Or what's the maximum amount of information we can have? You see, everything is quantized including space. So what is the smallest amount of space? It is one plank length, which is 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So the smallest space is 10 to the minus 66 centimeters. And the smallest amount of information is one bit. Therefore, the information density capacity is 10 to the 66th hour bits per square centimeter specifically on a hologram according to the string theorist. So a hologram, this bit can contain the equivalence I tell children, I use the children language. 100 giga, giga, giga, giga, giga, giga, giga, giga, giga, olds bits per centimeter, 7 gigabytes 10 to the 66 prohibits. That's a lot of information per square centimeter. That's the theoretical limit. And if we go in the three dimensions, one cubic centimeter is 10 to the 99 bits per square centimeter. Therefore, in a cube of space the size of a grain of sand. That can contain all the information in the history of human life from now until we are extinct. That is a theoretical number, not just grabbed from the space. Now I am going to demonstrate that this may be true. I have a very old holoclip. This hologram I made in 1969 after the long or after landing on the moon. But the hologram I cannot see anything. It is a piece of glass I have never cleaned. I took a laser and I cannot remember the size of the grain of darkness. So if I dial it like a radio, it is nothing. But if I keep dialing it, I have nothing. As soon as I am 37 minutes from the screen, I assume this is only 100 by 100 bits. It is more than that. So I have one kilobit of information transferred from here to there in one nanosecond. My data transfer rate is one terabyte per second. In one nanosecond, I transfer from here to the screen at least one kilobyte, so one terabyte per second. So that is the future of information transfer using holographic techniques and wirelessly by and in parallel processing. So this is a demonstration from what I call a classical hologram. I made it in 1940, 40 years ago. And nothing has changed except to increase. But I have more on this hologram. If I dial it again, I tell you that I have another channel of information. And if I turn right from here and right from behind, I have three dimensions of information. So I am giving an example of how we can believe the enormous storage capacity of a hologram can happen. Now with this, what can we do? What theorist has predicted in journals that I found this magazine when I was in London in year 2002, and he says, why we all live in a hologram? That is not believable. And the year in contact with the U.S., another magazine, in the United States, are you a hologram now? Are you joking? Can we believe it? It is written by a super straight theorist, a collaborator with Stephen Hawking. And confirmed by a straight contact in Princeton. They don't play instruments. They are straight theorists. They are in the Institute of Advanced Learning. They agree with this. They are serious. How can we believe that? So the next thing I want to talk about, I show this, now I would not do this with 60 years. They would start running and want to shoot basketballs. I would do this to 10 years, because I say, don't worry about something you don't understand. Every day we see things we don't understand. When I go to an art gallery, I don't understand most of the art work. When I go to a concert of modern music, I don't understand it. But if I want to understand it, I should try. So if you haven't get the math, I'm going to read this in words to you, what a hologram is. If we were to have a t-shirt made for this week, everybody to wear, you should have this equation on your t-shirt. That's a holography. But students, young students, don't even care that this is a powerful equation. They have no experience. So to the two-year-old, I have another story. What are they staring at that I ask? You look like you are four, six years old. If your mommy and your daddy each give you two apples, how many apples you have? And you say four. Very good. Then I find another little girl over there, also six years old, I said, if your mommy and daddy each give you two oranges, how many oranges do you have? She said four, of course. I said, that's amazing. That means two and two is four, no matter who is apple or orange. Why do they know? That means mathematics speaks perfect truth. And it's more true than you ever know. There are more than apples, oranges, or forks and gluons. You can name a billion things, but two and two are not equal to four. That's the power of mathematics. Then they may be more willing to listen why I am having this equation in there. First, I say, it's beautiful. These two equations are beautiful. John says Fourier created this equation more than 200 years ago, and he used it to apply to thermodynamics. For the last 150 years, these two equations instead of x would have t there, time, and applied to radio, television, so forth, time domain information theory. And now we're making holograms, which means we're creating something in space. So it's a difference between apples and oranges. This is an equation that works for everything. So I'm going to read this equation in words. It's a hologram. A hologram is gathering together the object, so hologram object, from the object, from each point of which interfering with a reference beam, creating a spatial frequency in a gradient. So the dot on the object is a bit angle with reference beam. This is a high frequency gradient, interference pattern. And the other dots, each one, create a unique gradient. So all you do in a hologram is act together all the gradings you're forming when you're exposing light from an object onto it. This is what you see. This is the object. What you see is over the hologram gathering together all the diffracted light into your eye, each one created, diffracted by a gradient. So this is a completely symmetrical process. In fact, now I have another analogy. It's the chicken or the egg. Look how it's intermingled or they are. The hologram depends on the object, the object depends on the hologram. Perfect symmetry. That's called beauty of mathematics. It's beautiful. Besides useful, never mind if you don't know how to solve it. Just enjoy the fact that it's beautiful. Now I want to tell you how useful it is also. For example, when Thomas Addison created the first working light bulb, he had to work very hard. He did more than 2,000 experiments. So when people asked Thomas Addison, what makes you such a genius? A genius. Thomas Addison says, a genius consists of 98% perspiration and 2% inspiration. In other words, he was not educated. He worked very hard and he discovered things. But there's a simple way to discover things. Using all inspiration and no swag. And that is to use the beauty, beauty, famous symmetry of equations. For example, if Dr. Goodman were here, I would tease him, you know, because he's not, but he has a very beautiful DVD we're going to show later. I will tell you how he wrote his great book, Introduction to Free Artics. It's the Bible for most of us. It's very easy for him to write that book because over the last 150 years, time domain information people, radio engineers, television have been using these equations, writing books on them. So all he has to do is take those equations, erase T the time and put X on it. Now we have a book on free artics. No swag. You're making these specific examples. Suppose in radio, in my days, when you dial to a station it had a lot of static noise in the background. How did they fix it? Well, they built a better radio. What is a better radio? Very fine tuning. So you can accept a narrow bandwidth of time. So now when you shine a laser beam through a lens and to expand it, the spot of light is very dirty. We even call it noise, diffraction of dust from lens. Now if you are the only first person to try to solve this problem, it's not easy. You have a dirty laser beam. How do you clean it up? Don't do it Thomas Edison's way. Don't try 2000 times. Just translate narrow time to narrow space. It's a pen hole. You just invent it or discover the spatial filter by using beautiful way of thinking by symmetry. In fact, now you can take a fully transformed textbook in space domain and go through every theorem. Each one will allow you to have an invention. Take the very first theorem in a fully transformed book. It's the shift rule. Those of you who study, it's saying that when you move the hologram this way and shine light through it, the image doesn't change if it's a front hofer. I have a demonstration for that. This is a front hofer hologram. I'm going to shine a beam or light through it and then move it. The pattern does not move. That means they actually had a pattern on how to reproduce all the movies and play it through holographic form. Why? Because Thomas Edison movie juxtaposed the film across, flashed the light and then juxtaposed it across to the next frame. That's how all movie projectors work. It destroys the film sometimes and it's very noisy. But if each frame is a front hofer hologram, then you can have a smooth transmission. As long as light is heading one frame, it doesn't change. Then suddenly jump to the next frame. Shift rule. Even better one. Radio signals can be scrambled or coded. You must have the program or the descrambler or the decoder to listen to the radio. That's the convolution theorem in Fourier transform. You make a hologram covered with a piece of ground glass. When you look at the hologram, you only see the ground glass. But if you own that ground glass, the decoder, you can project the image through the ground glass backwards and create a real image. You invent coding and decoding in holograms just by looking at what they have done in the time domain. There are infinite number of these examples. You can create this way. Now I want to show you. My purpose here is to, again, not to train holographers. I'm trying to educate them to treat holography as music, as art. This is the culture. It has all the attributes of each other. I got into holography by first publishing a paper on circular hologram. That way you can get grants. Otherwise you can't break into a new field. I was in nuclear physics. I found it frustrating teaching nuclear physics because nobody understands me. I can't show them. Holograms, I can show it to children, artists, people who have no background. Now I want to talk about another way of discovery. How to take an equation and improve it. You don't have to be a scientist. Be an artist. I'm talking to all of you, children or adult. If I take that piece of film out a hologram of that car and stretch it out into a flat piece, rectangular hologram, that piece of film still has all the information. But instead of a three-dimensional hologram, cylinder, I now have a two-dimensional hologram, yet has all the information. I have an example which I will put in exhibition tomorrow night. This is the flat piece of film from that hologram. I'll go and look at the top space. If I now illuminate this hologram, which I will in the art session with one beam of light, you will see all the information front of the car, back of the car, under the car with one eye, the camera, at no time, zero time. In other words, I have four dimensions of information in a two-dimensional medium. That means we can have even higher dimensions. There should be no limit to number of dimensions. So you ask, what use is dimensions? I can tell you first, higher dimensions than three is free. You don't have to pay rent. Three dimensions, you have to pay. So if you can use four dimensions, or now, string theorists use ten dimensions, the idea is whatever it takes to do something useful. I want to go into those examples next. Last time I went to SPIE meeting, this company gave away this shopping bag. You can also buy t-shirts with these equations in it. Now, I look at these equations, say from an artist's point of view. I think they're ugly. They're not beautiful. They're mismatched. In fact, there's something wrong with those equations. There's a hole in it, zero. These are two matched, but this doesn't match that. This doesn't match this. In fact, I have seen t-shirts that says, in the beginning, God said, then there was light. It's a very poetic statement, but I don't think God would say that. He will be much more elegant. This beautiful should be more beautiful. Based on that idea, we can do the following. I demand that this not be zero. I demand this equal to something just like this, electric, magnetic. Electric fields depends on electrical charges. Magnetic fields, we have no magnetic charges. That's why it's zero. Every magnet has north and south pole, and never north or south pole alone. That makes it zero, and that's wrong. Just by force, it's not zero. You are predicting the existence of magnetic monopole that it exists, north pole alone. We have never seen one or found one, but that doesn't matter. That happened to the neutrino. That happened to anti-particles. They were predicted this way by symmetry in mathematics to exist before we found them. There's a $10 billion machine being built, already built in Switzerland to do these kind of things to find particles. In this case, in 1964, Professor Hicks predicted the existence of Hicks boson, which accounts for the fact that we have mass. It has not been found. In September, they are going to fire up that $10 billion machine to find it. I'm sure magnetic monopoles. If monopoles exist and they move, it creates a magnetic current that would give another term. This got two terms, it got only one. That's bad, not beautiful. Then that zero will become a magnetic current. Now, you have two pairs of beautiful equations, but still not beautiful enough. God will not say it twice. We like to have this entire idea collapse into one equation. That one equation, maybe one of other equations, the string theorist by using ten dimensions, want to find the theory of everything, TOE. So that all physical laws should be expressed in one equation. That's the way God would speed. So let's do one thing at a time. Get next-world equation into one. There are four steps which I'm not going to go through. These demands that you define E and B in terms of more fundamental quantities like potentials, it demands that you give it more information, make it more powerful, throw in Einstein's theory of special relativity, and then define a four-dimensional operator and lo and behold, you have one single equation. This equation is not just a fancy way of writing naturalist equation. It's more. It includes relativity. And so if God speaks, he should say in the beginning, this is what he says, and there was light. So these are the things I do. In fact, I forgot to do one thing in my hurry to save time. I have another ploy. How to invent, understand many things by understanding only one thing, to show that the universe, everything is related. For example, the Fourier transform pair applies to infinite number of cases. In fact, it also shows the duality of matter. There are two equations with two things intermingle like chicken and an egg. Quantum theory says we are both particles and waves. Any mass that moves, it has a wavelength. The uncertainty principle says that if you know exactly where you are, you have no idea about the momentum of your mass. It means if you translate it into general language that you exist in duality. You are a particle and a wave. One of them, the waves of you is everywhere in the universe. When something happened to you at the edge of the universe, there's an effect. I mean, I'm not being a religious preacher. This is true. That's the main idea of entanglement in quantum mechanics. So finally, I want to entertain you a little bit by giving you a performance on something that all of you, well, maybe, no. In fact, if Paula Dawson here, well, anyway, she's not, she's afraid of my paper, maybe too technical. But 25 years ago, she telephoned me from Australia at the middle of night, of course, middle of day for her. She said, TJ, I can't make a hologram with the argon laser I just borrowed from the hospital. So I asked her, why don't you have an etalon? And she said, what's an etalon? I couldn't answer her question. I just told her to call the laser company and demand an etalon. E-T-A-L-O-N. But I think about it. How would I explain what an etalon does? This is my demonstration. $3 from a toy store made in China. This will help me explain not only the etalon, but infinite number of things. So let me show you. That's how a bugle works. To make it into a trumpet to play other notes, you put holes here. By putting holes there, you induce this cavity or resonant cavity to specialize on a certain note. So an etalon in a laser. This is a theory of a laser as well. When light bounce back and forth between two mirrors at the end, it forms the notes I just play, except they are not in sound, but standing waves of light. In a long laser, you just saw, you just heard. There are many notes. That's multi-molding. Your light is not pure. You can't make a hologram. You must play only one note. And you do that by putting an etalon on. In this case, putting the holes in the right place. With this, I can also talk about how atoms work. If these were three dimensions and I cause resonances, you are doing the exact calculation for the electronic energy levels. And this, of course, works for all instruments. So this is an example of infinite number of things. So all theories are related. If you understand the essence of them, you have increased your intellectual power. It turned out that a point, a British point, already understood what I've been talking about 150 years ago, William Blake wrote in a poem, outgreased of innocence, to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. With that, I have no more to say. Thank you.
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Serious popular scientific magazines in recent years are featuring headlines such as “Why we all live in a hologram”(1) and “Are you a hologram?”(2) Are they serious? I have found that because a hologram appeals to the most far reaching of our physical perceptions, a study of it can lead typical students to grasp the concepts in advanced physics such as quantum tunneling, entanglement, and the existence of higher dimensions. Furthermore, young students without prior training in higher mathematics can be induced to appreciate the symmetry between the spatial and temporal domains of information theory in particular, and the elegance and creative power of formal ideas in general. A series of specific physical demonstrations will be presented.
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10.5446/21876 (DOI)
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Wel, hylw amndangol, mae ni yn director Other John, sydd testedol i'r honno añadrhau a hwyl busyfynd am gyfèr diolio er mwyn yng ng encapsolpole pylwyddiad nhw. y Ffotonics Research Centre in Europe, ac mae'n ddweud y bwysig ymlaen sy'n ddweud ymlaen ymlaen i ddweud ymlaen i ddweud ymlaen a ddweud ymlaen i ddweud i ddweud ymlaen i ddweud. Felly, mae'r tawch yn ymlaen i ddweud o'r Ffotonics Ffotonics Cors o'r rhan. Felly, rwy'n gweithio'n fwy o ymlaen i ddweud ymlaen i ddweud, a all ystod o hayatog â cadw fel y ddweud, fel o'r oedd dd pontos rydych chi'n ddweud eich gynllun rydych chi'n myth gefi. Dewch chi a modd o strony, le theoretical, ateith, ti ralliesach ymateb, gall2000 o oedgliad a chycawn i gweithio gwneud 你wл swiftly... wedi iawn i ddweud.... O atti, dyfodol gwneud y birch yn cael mily suscribu i'r holl oρόu feęfoi ac i chi i abused. Fydd ams служ잖아요? Maeúsa wneud restaurants na dwyfion ni wedi bod yn cynnig pawb A levels which is the relevant qualification in England or they may be mature students who have worked in industry and want to come back and get a degree in engineering or physics or they may be international students who just have different qualifications from the ones accepted at university. The course was designed to encourage more students in filigap in the education process we have them in the UK, and assist with what is called our widening and participation agenda. That is, in England, we tend to have physicists and astronomers who are all the same. They are all mostly white middle class students of the same age, same experiences.orousn bronch â gael bod ymd普f yng Ng نeth. Rydw i diogel yn amendments gyda casossaethog nifer a acrossod mwy am ein bod hwn yn gymryd. Rydw i mor gwyn mewn i'r unέryd yn gweithio os gymryd ac yrいやu am ymgyrch cyfre rhywbeth i google y bach. Ysglwên ar y drafn, ac ddiwgach BlwyngWin yn gweld y peth. dysfunction. Os e기�wyd wedi bod yn umbyniu Today Clubr iγroboi ac yn y methu hynfor iawn o'r cyfrifiad gennynywedddy recovery sylwg yn hyn ac mae'n gwzlad yn dweud yn ris views sydd ond yn ag hellas hwn. Da chi wedi erioed i gydbwyno, dostawer ei amgelwydio newydd. am gyntaf hong toilets, gallwn wedi cael strategically ac yn iEE Gerry ac yn y cechwlad y popeth ynoneydd. Efallai, hefyd pwyledog suru updates, yn yr September 10, cyf примu cyn y cartes. Efallai yn byw heddiw cael ei haf mwylo, yn ei chcôl ac yn eu crissau ar wathur. ugrifenn mniej, y bywyddoeth wrth ein describesll weltydd oedarn ndw i cafwysol o beth am wisi am gynnig, holl o doo Beth arniadau, holl o bla vieneugol, o bobl wedi gweld iawn a'r lleol. Hyun ifanc? Ac y chrawethaf y歩 scripture ydw i anar meditationam hwnnw, felly er roedd 120 dyma y<|sv|><|transcribe|> Safen laser. Ergans b VeryM. Duhions yr Autyx Demonstration. Fylde apa i bygings pairnaethaf Hoeltra. Wypte sight highly show. chap dudes eronrens side. Annan tre接下來 aynı. o oedd iawn y teulu, festivaleth cynhyd Zhenggwyrion wedi ar offerd ychydig nhw iawn a chi dda sinmde interior yn ddweud dyn nhw'n ei ddweud o'r yllangodol ar yr iechior更 你 o���? followers? fel fyddwch wedi gael diogel, dwi sicr ddefnyddio'r rhan o'r pwyno cymdeilio'r oedd… bod y viddie chassis ei r excusu caeliaethu a phan â agran f lorsquenol unrhyw f recolliadoddiad ar hyn wedi cael eu Aberchon mi yn y effangyo ers draw rewardeddiad wedi bod gy rehellio'r r emoji yn coursefod mouthion. Felly obsoletech wneud gymdeithig am街weydd o'r prydyn o wg hyfforddydd ym ysdстиgydd, eu gwasgliadau ein ma rhwng yn eu fan�un iaith plwytaadau. Mae gennychud ychydig hwn buddig i dyn nhw iSEG. A oes ym mondi hynny yw, newid o'r rhesaith bod gofannol o anoddiadau'ch meir a la Rosi. Some of the students were at that point terrified, because some students from some parts of the world don't do their own research. They expect to sit there and be told things, rather than go out and find out things themselves. Some of them had never given an aural presentation before, so were equally terrified. So what we ask students to do is research, discuss in a team what they've learned, Find out what do I need to know, where can I find out the information and then they go off and the teacher, or the professor, isn't a teacher anymore, they facilitate the students learning. lleolol. If a student comes to me and says, how does this work, I say, that's a very good question. Where are you going to find out? So the idea is that you enable a student to find research themselves. Of course I'll tell them in the end, if I know, but very often I have to say go and speak to somebody else about that. So it's important to show them that their teachers don't know everything. So for the holography part of the course, Malyw Yum, 120heavy yogurt in two days, exhausting. They were made on holocams by which were designed by Mike Anderson an educator in the UK. Here are the little rigor. There's a laser diode in here. The light spreads out to a front surface mirror here that is being blocked with a piece of cardboard there yw y cyfwysg tech a ddweud 8 holograms. Felly, dwi'n meddwl y byddai'r studenau yn ymgyrchol, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r holograms, ac rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd. Felly, i ddweud y hologram, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r materialau, o'r materialau rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r tjau, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r holllograms i fod yn edrych o'r cyffredinol o'r hunain, y prif iddo y sefydliad o'r hyn o'r holllograms, ei ddweud y cwmnydd yma, yn ddweud o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r teimlo i'r materialau ar sy'n ddigonol o'r hyn o'r holllograms. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r holllograms. Felly, dydych chi'n meddwl i'r holllograms, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r holllograms. I had another student, a postgraduate student, Mohammed Bilal, who was developing the holograms, and one other student who was doing the optics demonstrations, Sam Berry, who is a very gifted teacher. So we had some fun things. This is a mirage, which many people in the UK would have seen. I'm not sure how international this is, but it has a little pig that floats above the parabolic mirrors here, so you reach for it and it disappears. So using that as a demonstration, students were taught about real and virtual images. We put 3D glasses on students and they saw 3D posters. They also learned about 3D that way. We taught colour theory by using red jelly and green lasers, and red lasers show difference in colour absorption. Sam did demonstrations with laser transmission and holograms. Students were also given hands-on workshops in spectroscopy, students analysing elements, tubes here, and observing the spectra that they could see through spectroscopes. This gave the background to a lot of what was going on in the holography to understand how the holograms worked. All of that information also helped students with the research that they were doing at the same time as some were making holograms, some were doing optics demonstrations. Other teams of students were learning about photonics applications. At the end of that week, students had had to produce a poster on a photonics application. In the poster, they had something exciting, this was holographic microscopy. They chose their own topics. At the beginning of the week, they knew nothing about photonics at all. By the end of the week, they were giving presentations on things that they learned. This was a typical team for students. They gave one-minute presentations on their research poster. They were timed, so they had to be exactly one minute, and lots of people listened to their presentations. This was a typical group that listened to the presentations. They were assessed on their laser safety, the quality of their holograms, whether they'd scratched them or put fingerprints on them, or whether they'd bought in a suitable object to make holograms of. We made sure that students were sitting at their seats at the beginning of the day and left at the end of the day by giving them points for their employability skills. They had to assess their own performance every day in a SWAT analysis, which looked at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, what could they do with the information that they'd learnt that day, and the threats to see what might happen. Lots of teamwork problems. If you put four people together and say, go off and produce something fantastic, all sorts of difficulties happen with personal relationships. This process helped them to work on their team building. At the end, they produced, as a team, a fabulous poster and gave a presentation of their research. We analysed our own performance, those of us who had delivered the course, and we looked at what the benefits were for the whole of the course. One of the benefits was diversity. It was very, very helpful having students in the groups of English speakers who were very helpful to the team if they had an international student who didn't speak or who spoke English as a second language, because the team had to make sure that everybody understood what they were doing. The English speakers tended to imagine that they were communicating well, but they weren't, not unless they had an international student with them. That we found to be a real strength. Holograms. Everybody really loved making the holograms. Despite learning about the science behind them, everybody still got excited with their hologram and thought they were magic. It gave students who were 18 the opportunity to do their own research. University tends to be that you don't get to do any of your own research until the third year as an undergraduate student. It was a popular course. It raised self-esteem and increased student motivation. This course keeps students in the university. The major threat is the success of the course and the success of the foundation year as a whole. Next year we have 160 holograms to make in two and a half days. It was exhausting making 120. I'm thinking, oh no, how can we cope with 160? We will buy in some more equipment. Physically space is difficult to get large groups of students doing hands-on work in. That's a threat, but we are planning to mitigate these problems. To conclude, we've actually doubled the number of students going into physics from our foundation year. All international students particularly used to go straight into engineering from the foundation year. They tended to value engineering more than physics. I'm from the School of Physics and I wanted to encourage more students to come to physics. We managed to do that last year. We're continuing to repeat the project. We believe that holography is ideally suited to teaching foundation year students because it's so popular and students enjoy it so much. Lastly, using the problem-based learning teaching method or technique along with holography partner really successfully to keep those students encouraged and motivated. It provides an excellent vehicle for effective student learning. Just to finish, I'd like to thank all of these people without whom the course wouldn't be possible. Thank you very much.
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Learning to make holograms underpins the University of Southampton’s Foundation Photonics course. The Foundation year enables students to develop the skills necessary to gain access to a University degree in Engineering or Physics. The week-long Photonics course utilizes a problem-based learning approach and aims to boost student motivation and increase the Foundation course student retention rate. It is anticipated that by 2010 the number of students taking part in the Photonics course will have almost tripled since it was piloted in 2005. This paper reports on the development of the course, outlining some of the challenges and opportunities associated with educating a diverse student body and managing large numbers of students making holograms
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10.5446/21879 (DOI)
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This presentation was prepared for the history session, but since the first day, as you noticed, was already filled and I was presenting in the art concept, so we decided to move this presentation in the computer generated and digital holography since talks about computer generated holographs. So in a way we had some highly technical presentation before and after this afternoon. So let's take this as some kind of parenthesis, it's very low-tech in fact and we I will bring you in a little journey in history. As I told you the other day, I'm an art historian, I know this is some kind of disease. Every time I have I'm looking at some concept, I have to go back as far as I can to look at where it comes and like the other day I want to state the obvious. I'm working with what I call synthetic holography, I use the word just to identify working with a limited set of images to make an horizontal parallax hologram. Most of my holograms are 1200, 280 point of views. The one that I have in the exhibition room, the eclipse is older so it has 1499 point of views. The numbers is less than 1000 but I don't remember exactly. Anyway, I consider myself a prospectivist because way before I was working with holography, I was drawing perspective picture. I was drawing stereoscopic picture by hand, the atroville-y nail perspective, spherical perspective, all kinds already all kind of aberrations and distortions. So from my point of view, well no no pun and that, from my point of view this is a multiple viewpoint or multiple point of view perspective system and this is in fact the holy grail or the prospectivist. So let's take a look a little bit at history what I mean about that. We have to go back as far as the beginning of the 15th century when Fidipo Brunelleschi in Italy had architected, he was in Florence and he was just starting to play with perspective that was just starting to be, I would say, a working system before that there was all sorts of perspective but full of distortions. So Brunelleschi take his plan and elevation of the back history in Florence, it's an octagonal building and he makes a painting with a central vanishing point, he takes this little painting, he pierces a hole in the at the vanishing point and then he takes a mirror, goes in front of this architecture and try to align the lines of his prospective drawing with the lines of the the architecture. This experiment, we don't have the painting, it disappeared. The first time it was recollected it was by his biographer, 70 years later nobody ever saw the painting except this guy, Manetti, who says that he saw the painting, he writes I saw this but that's it and it became in the history of 3D imaging, this is this mythical spectacular experiment that we don't even know if it really happened. It's like Galileo dropping his object on top of the Pisa Tower, it's like the apple for Newton and gravity, we don't know much about it. So what I did since I'm an experimentator, I went in my workshop and I decided to make a table top version of the the tavoletta, I didn't have money to go to Florence so well. So what I did was just a little model, a table with a grid, I made a drawing of this this octagonal model and I used a mirror to align, so you have a top right corner, I didn't take photograph, there was no digital camera so it was expensive to take photograph of experiment, so I don't have photograph, this is just the little simulation of the setup. And yeah, sure, you can align the perspective lines with the 3D model, but what I noticed was way different from usually what you will find in books about the history of 3D imaging or perspective. What I observed was this thing is so rigid, it's unbelievable, if your eyes move a millimeter on the side, you destroy the alignment, if you move the mirror, you destroy the alignment, if you move the object, the smallest little variation, you destroy the experiment completely. So I did this experiment in 1988 and from then what I was seeing is in perspective is a view of a cyclops, but a cyclop that would be tied, a bonded cyclop, can't move, only one eye. And then when you look at the whole history of perspective, you understand that it is a very, very limited system. And a few years later in 1435, Alberti, who is considered the one who spread perspective, but not really the case, decided to make a geometrical system based on Bernalisti's experiment. So what he does is a very closed system. The viewer doesn't exist for a bit. The only thing he says about the viewer is that when you do a mural, you take the average height of a man and it gives you a reason. And how he places point of view is simple. He says, on the canva, I place a dot. That's it. But his treaties wasn't published until about 150 years later. The first treaties of perspective is by Jean-Péle Riviera. And Jean-Péle Riviera is a French painter. And he's in northern Europe. He's not, I would say, influenced by the religious ambience of Italy. So he had access to some books that still today we don't know if Alberti had access. One of which was Al-Haitan books on optics. It's a 10th century treatise on optics that changed completely the history of science. And it was translated in Latin. Al-Haitan, if you don't remember, is, in fact, the invented experimental science. He discovered that the eye doesn't project a ray to see, but the light comes in the eye. So, Pele Riviera used a system that is very, very similar to Al-Haitan. But he placed a secondary point, a vanishing point outside of Canva. So, and for him, it's not a closed system anymore. And what he does, what he writes in his treaties, there's a little sentence which is very important. He says, we have to consider the different angle of view on an object. So, for him, it becomes a system where we have a choice where the viewer, the artist has to move around what he represents and look which angle he wants. As for Alberti, it always fixed central frontal. To me, Vierter is so important that I used his treatise as an inspiration for my track that the solograph is hologram. That's the book hologram, you see in the exhibition. And a little drawing in what the first page is, in fact, one of his drawings that I just added the multiple point of view. So, in fact, I would say that multiple point of view commem- start with him. We know now that what he did was not what we call distance point or the point that you place in space to define the distance between the viewer and your perspective. It was invented by Leon Arpnoda Vinci, but like Alberti, his manuscript, his notebooks and treaties on painting wasn't published until a hundred or more years later. Vierter's book is the first one that was printed. It's the first one who was in Latin and French because he wanted this technology or this system to be spread widely. It's also a very good example of pirate stuff. Now we pirate all sorts of documents and files. Well, after 1505, first publication of Vierter's book in 09, in 10, there is printers that make illegal copies of his book and they spread it all over Europe. So, it's very influential. But all this shows that it's single point. And this is something that is influenced by John Pikman, who wrote the 30s on optics in 13th century. And Pikman wrote this little sentence that I want to translate for you. The duality of eyes should be brought back to unity. For them, even though we have two eyes, even though we move, they think that since the two eyes, at the end, merge, at the nerve, merge, it becomes one point of view. And this is, in fact, the ancestor of sycophanes perception by Villa Jules, where they think that what we see is only and always from one point of view. Leonardo da Vinci talks about it also saying that we can't do a painting or an image like a mirror since we have to see it only from one point of view. And in fact, what most people know, now we look at those in age from any point of view, we take it in our hands and we look at it. In those days, they were watching perspective drawing with the viewer. It was simply a lens and a mirror. They would put the perspective drawing on the table and look at it from one single point of view using this lens. This is a page of a treatise on optics by Koken in 1784 in Japan. So for several centuries, perspective was supposed to be viewed with the viewer. And this is interesting because it's the same thing with stereoscopy. We know that the first stereoscopic drawing dates from the 12th at the, yeah, 12th, 13th century, excuse me. There was no stereoscopic or stereoscopic viewer. So they use free viewing to see that. But everybody had a lot of difficulties with this. There was no comparison. It was new. And as you can see the drawing in the top left, it's not geometrical perspective. It's just observation drawing. So we have to wait until the waitstone arrived with the stereoscope and make some stereoscopic drawing. So apparently we link the invention of 3D imaging process with machines. The tablet of Biberlilisky, even though there is a other perspective system before, is considered a proof that perspective works. The stereoscope that we invented in 1833 is considered a proof that stereoscopy is supposed to work. So it's always the apparatus that seems to define the introduction of the process, while in fact those ideas usually come from elsewhere and sometimes way before that. And the thing, she arrived with something and it will bring us back to Olo Ref. He talks about the distortion. The thing is, when you present a perspective drawing from a single point of view, object that are aligned on the x-axis, those who are on the side, they are farther than you. But when projected on your plane, they will look to be stretched, wider than the closest object. You can see in the graph that the rays cut the flat plane are wider on the left and on right, and right compared to the one in the center. And you can see the effect on the right rendering. To correct this, you have to curve your plane and then you establish, you correct the distortion. You would say, well, I just have to rotate my point of view and look at the object on the left and look at the object on the right and do my drawing with vanishing point from there. If you do that, then you're creating another distortion because you're adding vanishing point and all your horizontal lines will curve. So that's the birth of curvilineal perspective. So obviously, I had to make a test. So I designed an hologram of a perspective system in front of it. And I printed it on glass, the same as the distortion hologram that I showed the other day, and started measuring all sorts of things. And I got really confused. I was looking at this and then I noticed that on my rendering, on the corners, I had the Vinci's distortion. You can see on the floor that the center circle and the circle at far right don't have the same width. Those that are farther are wider. So I had exactly the same distortion that Vinci was talking about. But when I look at my hologram, I didn't see this distortion. It wasn't there. All circles were circles. So I started asking all graffers around. I remember talking about it with David Bradcliffe, who was from Giehola, who was in Montreal at XYZ, imaging. And I started arguing with it, there is something weird here. I don't see distortion. And he was saying, it's a given. It's like this. It's natural. I talked about it with Roman Ross, who works now at Rabbit Hole. And he started making graphic and explaining all sorts of things to me. And for me, for them, all graffers, it was something given. It was coming with it. It was like that. That's it. Don't bother with that. For me, as a perspectivist, what I was looking at is the solution of a five-century distortion problem that nobody could solve. You can find some software that will correct in some way some perspective image. You can find in photography perspective correction lenses or different tricks that you can correct. But in drawing, in painting, no, you're stuck with this distortion. And I had in front of me an hologram showing that, no, I have a perspective system, 3D, no wide angle distortion. It was so big for me that I couldn't accept it. So I was completely confused. Now I understand that, yes, it's a given. So I would like you, all of my friends, to be aware that in your system, especially those in work with computer generated holograms, that you just solved a 500-old distortion problem. A lot of people broke their teeth on that before. So, a few months later, I'm working on the Eclipse hologram that you could see in the exhibition. And it's vacation time. So I go camping. Two weeks, far in the woods. I live in Canada. We have lots of forests. So I would say 80 kilometers, 100 kilometers from the first village. And it's raining hard. So there's only five campers where I am. Everybody's gone. I'm alone. My neighbors are bears and raccoons. And what I like to do when I'm camping is drawing. So I had this little sketchbook imported from China. And I start a panoramic drawing of a landscape that was around where I was camping. So I'm drawing hours and hours. It's raining. And I'm only opening what we call a concept in a format. I think it's Chinese cedye or something like that. It's an accordion sketchbook. You know, the pages are all folded like an accordion. And it gives you a very large panoramic sketchbook. So I'm only opening two pages at a time. Sometimes four pages just to draw the collection. And at the end, when I arrive at the end, I open it for the first time. And then, like a slap in the face, I can see it. What I did in this drawing was exactly the same thing that I was trying to do with my hologram. I was drawing a landscape from a series of point of view. But the problem is I'm far away in the wood. I have no computer. And, well, my hologram is not clear and not here and very far away. I spend the rest of the week thinking about holography. And I remember that I had, it was raining a lot. Sometimes I had sunlight. So I had rainbows. And I waved on the lake with all shiny little reflection. So I used the wave to imagine how light hit my hologram and how my movement would change those light orientation. And I really start to understand that what I was doing as a perspectivist was not only a 3D volumin boy hologram, but a series of multi-point of view. And what hit me at that time was a sentence from a book that I really liked. In fact, it's the second book I bought on holography. And it was expensive. I bought it in the late 70s. It was $83 Canadian. That was big at that time. I didn't trail my girlfriend because I didn't want her to know that I spent $83 on a holography book filled with mathematics. And if I can evaluate with a number, my skills in mathematics, I would say zero is a good number. I'm really bad at mathematics. But three-dimensional imaging technique by Takanori Okushi is filled with definition and graphics. That I can understand. And there's a little comment when he talked about holographic stereograms. He says it would be better be called a holographic panorama gram since it allows observation from almost continuously different directions. And this for me was very important. So again, I start looking at history. And from the Cyclops, I discovered the Moe, the Nomai. The other day, I talked about Kuo-si, this Chinese painter of the 11th century, talking about boy-like volume. Kuo-si again, in the same treatise on painting, on landscape painting, he talks about the change of shape with every step one makes and the different shape of a mountain as seen from every side. In this book, in this paragraph, he talks about how the painter walks in the landscape to represent different pointers. He's at one position. He draws the lake and then he moves away, go up the hill and draw the forest and go up the mountain and draw the other mountain on the other side. If you go in the same landscape and you go up the mountain, you will notice that you can't see the lake anymore. So it's a representation from a movement. So this to me was very close to what Okushi was talking about, what I was just beginning to understand in computer-generated holograms. Try to find that kind of representation in Occidental art and you will have a lot of difficulties. There is a few things that are from different point of view, but they don't represent space. They usually represent time, like the 33 of Bayeux who recollects a war. There's no spatial representation, it's all flat. There's no spatial representation. It's just a series of events. It's cinematographic. What Kouoshi did is not cinematographic. Zanjidwan a few years later did one that was 53 meter large and it's a King Ming festival. So you start from the right and then you roll and unroll your straw and you have all what happened, but all the space works. It's all axonometry. It's all parallel perspective. Sometimes you switch a little bit just to connect different spatial zones. I put it small like this just for you to become aware how narrow the screen is, how narrow your computer screen, your TV, your sketchbooks, your paper, your canvas, even most of your own brands, how narrow they are and how wide these kind of things are supposed to be. So that's why I made the scroll. I wanted, I thought, okay, should I write a paper about this? And well, there was no symposium on this. So I simply decided to make a reference on an hologram. So that's what I did with the broken window, which is you see a smaller version. So you don't really have the panoramic effect. The original version is one meter four, one meter for a 40 centimeter. So you have with this width, you have a panoramic effect. So where am I now? And I think that the other day what I presented was some possibilities. So here's another possibility. First of all, the geometry of a panorama is very simple. A central point of view plays in the center of the world. That's occidental panoramic representation. The artist and the observer are in the center of the world. This is a very egocentric representation of space. And this point of view is simply rotating and looking at what is surrounding. So if the artist represents what is around, the viewer sees what is around. Now, if you try to apply the same thing on a holographic panorama or a computer-generated hologram, you get a geometry that is quite different and quite interesting. In fact, what happens is that you decentralize the point of view. You get it outside of the center of the world. What is the center of the world? It's your hologram plate. It's your content. It's your object. This is becoming the center of the world. This is important. And as with the Chinese scroll painting that I just showed you, your point of view is moving. It's a walking representation of space. You're not the center of the world anymore. You're not this egocentric viewer anymore. You're just passing in the space and looking at it through a window. So I'm starting recently to have a question. We talk about panorama and background. What could she talk about panorama and background? Isn't it traveling? In fact, we're moving. So if I use the terms coming from cinema, it's more of traveling than a pan. Since, again, like I said, I'm an artist, I am. So I like definitions. And I like to have some poetic definition that will bring an image in the head of the reader. So I call it nomadic perspective. Now, that's what I'm working on right now. I'm working on a panoramic hologram that is three meter large. It's still using calipraki and words like I did in the book hologram and the scrollogram. But this time it's all quotation from old perspective and optics treaties. And I have Latin, French, English, Arabic, and Chinese calipraki in it. It's like all my other hologram. It is experimental. I don't know if it will work. I don't know how it will work. But I'll try. What I want to say about this is that we may have here a system that not only represents as usually what we see treaty object, but some kind of non-inversive panoramic display where the viewer walks in front of the hologram and the hologram is simply a window on a very large field of view. Now, if we do a small hologram, the window becomes very clear, very present. But now with computer generator holograms with holographic images, it's easy and feasible to do very large hologram. It's feasible to do tiling. And as Stas from Geolab described earlier, it's also feasible to light it when it's horizontal parallax only. This is again very interesting, I have a touch of horizontal parallax. It's possible to light it with several lamps placed side by side. By the way, if you look at my scroll hologram in the exhibition, you will notice that there is two lamps on it side by side. If it works. So I can foresee holographic display that in fact would be a panoramic display, fully treaty, free viewing, no apparatus to view the treaty, no wide angle distortion, and with freedom of observation. So like I said, I don't know if it will really work. So that's it. Now, well, yeah, what I know is that well, I hope that I will see each and every one of you at the next international symposium of this little graph. Thank you very much. Thank you. So I'm going to say, John, you're not escaping it. I have two remarks. I'm going to take the chair, the session chair at Paragate and grab the microphone. The first one is you should, if you can find your old girlfriend, you should reassure her that you're a brilliant investor because copies of Oshie are going on the internet after you pay $400,000. Where are you going? Because that book is in such demand. He's making a creep. So those of you who have a spare copy might be able to pick up a few dollars. The second thing I want to know, I'm glad you left that up there, is that double thrust in geometry you've got set up. You said this is called plane of the hologram, but I'm going to add a complication to it that doesn't have to be the plane of the hologram in the case of stereograms that's really the plane of the emitters. The plane of the emitters can be someplace different from the plane of the hologram. So there's yet another degree of, oh yeah, you can throw into your bottle as to where the emitters are relative to the physical hologram. And that's something that hasn't been explored very much. The paper that Quinn Smith wrote and presented in the comics West this past January, we had a discussion about geometry. So we've been thinking about it a lot. At some point, we've been generating a series of images where the emitters were in different places relative to the hologram plane and see if that goes change one's perception of space. I know we're right before lunch, but we still have time for a few questions. If there's anybody in the audience, I'm going to see it. This is kind of a question in its dialogue request in the sense that there's been a lot of discussion from a lot of your earlier rendering shows a dual-prostume and single-prostume renderer, but with a sheer orientation. I'm noticing in this one you're approachating the prostume plane. Now is that accurate if you feel confident that that would give you or would you, in the sense go back to the renderer, leave that central plane fixed and sheer the renderers? No. I wouldn't say that. It's not a scientific illustration of all this geometry. It's just an illustration on how it behaves, how the movement related to the hologram. No, I didn't go that far. And like Michael just described and what you're saying, there was a lot of variation that we could do with this kind of basic setup. Now, like he said, I don't think that there was a lot of people experimenting that yet, but I'm pretty sure that there is some very interesting possibilities. In fact, what I'm looking at is that 3D is maybe the biggest asset of holography, but there is other things. Positioning of images related to the hologram for example is one thing that is quite beneath, so there is a lot of variation. Now, I didn't go that far yet. I think that I have to experiment my hologram and then from this experiment try to see all sorts of variation. And like I said, I'm not a mathematician, I don't have a scientific background. I'm giving away those ideas because what I would like to see is other people who really know that kind of stuff on the scientific side that try a few things. The only thing I ask is if you try those kind of things, show me the hologram. That's only what I want. Just one quick note, what I ask in addition to the other one, like the best hologram show, in this genre of the talks, I believe you contributed a lot of very worthwhile knowledge. Thank you, John. Thank you. I think this story becomes very, as you said, in China, the moving eye, I think Piero was first in the way to discuss the moving eye in the dynamo system. I don't think it was the first, not sure, maybe, but I would have to check some dates. The problem is with Piero La Francesca is that his manuscript wasn't published until I think it was first published in the 18th century or something like that. So people were very impressed by his painting, but his writing were almost unknown. That's something that we tend to forget. It's the same thing with Leonardo da Vinci. He was known by painters and rich people who wanted his work. But his manuscript were a few parts of it were published in the 17th century, I think, first. The publication was the copy distribution. Now you make a book on holography. It's spread all over the world. It's on internet. You can buy it from anywhere. You can download it. In those days, you can expect that a book on perspective was copied by N and then read by what? Four, five different people. So it was very limited. That's why I see Jean-Pére Rémiata as more important in that way, because not only it's the first that was printed, but by writing it in French of the 16th century, he gave access to painters who didn't have a classical education and couldn't read Latin. But Piedro de la Francesca is, even though he talks to write about moving on, he's still really into Leonardo da Vinci and Albertina Proud with a very frontal perspective and very fixed area. Dante on Vignola's Distarberry's On Perspective wrote at the same time another treatise and not only he says that it's only one point of view, but he challenged people and he says to others that tried to point the view that this is a narrow. It is seen as something completely impossible in those days. Thank you again.
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The structure of a synthetic hologram is made of thousands of 3D computer graphic images corresponding to as much points of view on a three-dimensional scene. This technology brings back a perspectivist approach to holography. However, the multiple viewpoints of these holograms depart from the fix single point of view of classical perspective. To appreciate the entire space, the observer has to vary its points of view; he has to move, to walk. Holographic panoramagrams are indeed panoramas. In the history of imaging, very few occidental artists have undertaken the representation of space and volume from variable points of view, whereas this approach is widespread in oriental landscape painting. In this paper, we take a look at the history of multiple points of view perspective to seize the particularities of synthetic holography and better understand its place in the historical development of 3D imaging and holography. Searching in the texts of renaissance treatises on perspective and oriental treatises on painting, we can find several indications that the artists of the past centuries where aware of the necessity of representing multiple points of view and attempted to do so. From Jean Pelerin Viator and Kuo Hsi, the concepts of multiple viewpoints in spatial representation have found their way into synthetic holography, to create the necessary conditions for imaging space in its entirety.
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10.5446/21880 (DOI)
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I only want to make a few points, you'll be relieved to hear, so my talk's going to be quite short. There's just one major point I want to make. And it's this. I mean, it's obvious that if you want to see something, you have to have light, okay? And seeing an object in front of you, you can say, well, it's round, it's squishy, it's got this color. You can sort of notice all of those fairly abstract qualities pretty well, and just about everyone in the world could do that. But if you want to actually figure out what those shapes, colors, and things mean, then that's something very different. You need to rely on cultural information in order to be able to interpret what you see. And art, really, there's not much point in having art unless you can get some, derive some kind of meaning, or you can understand something by seeing it. It's very rare for artists to make work just for themselves. There are artists like that, but I'm not one of them. I'm an artist who makes work for other people to look at, and I'm sure most people here are the same sort of way. So seeing as I've put forward the argument that the interpretation or understanding or enjoyment of art has to do with cultural knowledge, then let us look, today I want to examine the very specific and unique place that holographic imagery holds in cultural knowledge. Now for most people in the world, the ontology of a hologram is, in fact, the computer graphic representations and special effects of holograms in films. That's because people rarely see real holograms. Now for some artists, recuperating that kind of fictitious origination information, it is very much the right of the holographic artist to re-appropriate the incorrect, you could say on one hand, or it's just another imaginative form of a hologram which computer graphics and the film industry and science fiction industry had about holograms. John Richardson has written a marvellous paper documenting all of those instances, and I've also given a paper at Wales on this subject. So here's a work of mine, the master hologram made by Walter Spearing's and the shim made by AJ Langerdoc called The Legend of the True Hologram, and it incorporates the type of iconography that is associated with a hologram to the general public. It has a little princess, it has a ray of light, and it has a kind of a rastering form, and from it I have The Legend of the True Hologram written in several images, several languages. So the first thing I want to look at is really how do people usually understand art, because later I'm going to say, within that I'm going to explain how it works differently for holograms than it does for usual artworks. So there are sort of four main ways in which people are able to understand what art means, unless they know the artist or they are the artist. And that is, they've seen other artworks, they know other artworks in the same genre or the same subject matter, they've seen representations of art in books and on the internet, and they are understood, or they understand the theories and writings surrounding art. Now these photographs I've taken at the recent Venice Biennale in 2009 of art work that is shown in 2009, this is sort of how some of the artwork works. And I've chosen examples which in some way sort of slightly peripherally engage with holographic imagery. So let's have the first category, going and actually seeing experiences of artwork, that's how a lot of people get to know if they can understand this work or that work, is because they've already seen another work which is either similar or in the same media. Now I would argue that because holography is so incredibly different from other media, that seeing light installations and experiences of other media really isn't all of that instructive in terms of being able to understand the very specific type of holographic space. And as Jonathan Ross pointed out in an earlier paper today, the experience, the direct experience of holographic imagery is very small and there are very, very few international exhibitions. So the very first of the four points is negated, people don't get to see holographic exhibitions. And the second thing is familiarity with what has already taken place in that media. When we see this video installation work, we're reminded of a whole lot of associated artworks that we've seen in recent wraparound pseudo narratives which are made of fictitious elements combining computer graphics and figures, namely the work of Bill Viola and this relates also back to classical themes and we're reminded of post-colonial theorization. So the minute that we see works like this, we already have seen other video images and compositions and that helps us to understand what we're doing. But of course with the hologram, because we haven't seen other examples, we don't really know what these things mean. And I think the thing I neglected to mention when I first showed the hologram that I made called The Legend of the True Hologram is that it's totally fine if people haven't seen holograms before and they've only seen holograms in films if you want to make work about that. But if you want to make other kind of artwork in your holographic artist, if you're Melissa Crenshaw for example who uses all of the most beautiful specific characteristics of the holographic medium such as three-dimensional shadows which project into the viewer's space, pseudoscopic imagery, I mean anti-peppers, shadow grams, these types of intrinsic holographic phenomena are really very difficult to appreciate. They are part of the rich vocabulary of holographic art but the general public is just not familiar with them. We are but they aren't. And the third point is the documentation of art is generally the way in which we learn about art. In Australia that's the main way we learn about art because living so far from Europe we generally only see photographs of imagery until we can afford to come overseas and see the real thing. Now of course in the case of perspectival imagery or imagery which doesn't have a particular necessity to comprehend the spatial dimension, then taking a photograph with a lens is of course totally fine. But let's just remember this, that holographic space is nothing like lens-based photography and the minute you take a photograph of a hologram you totally transform the space and ruin and destroy the special holographic effects. So therefore the third factor, the documentation of the artwork in fact totally negates some of the most amazing and fantastic features of it. And now let's have the final point, the theorization of art. I think all of us are quite well aware that in the very early days of holography Jean Beauchryard and Umberto Eco both produced theories which were rather similar in some ways, the simulacra and the hyper-real. And these theories really had to do with the idea that holography was merely a replication of reality. But funnily enough these theories which of course were not at all supported by the artwork that was produced at the time because artists were very much engaged with the specific pictorial qualities of the holographic image. And so when art critics came to actually look at a hologram they did not in fact see that the predictions of Umberto Eco and Jean Beauchryard had come true and perhaps that's why critics had to stay away because there wasn't really a theoretical frame. But something very hilarious about the incredible theoretical frame which surrounds digital media at the moment and one of the rare contemporary books which mentions holography on digital media, the book by Timothy Murray of Cornell University entitled The Digital Baroque actually mentions holograms in the context of other light media and media imagery. These arguments all have to do with the kind of the power struggle, the domination of lens-based imagery about perspective and this image, this artwork here which really is almost a kind of a manifestation of an enormous, a mass of French theorization about the panopticon, about the privilege of a single point of view, about surveillance which really is a completely different system of space to the holographic image. Now we have on one hand Beauchryard and Echo saying that a hologram is a simulacra of space which one would presume actually supports the fact that analog holographic space does not have a specific favorite point of view. So you would have thought that the French theory would have embraced the analog hologram as an utterly new method of spatial reconstruction and the politics of space is so intimately connected to the freedom of the individual, the way of looking at reality. One would have thought that this argument would have been taken up but I think really the reality of the situation is it just takes a very long time to actually see what is already there. This is the point that I'm making that although that real space may have been in a hologram that in fact although you could show the hologram to people that they could look at it, that in fact because of perspective, because of the domination of the lens, it is actually not that easy to even see something that is before your very eyes. And it's for this reason that these other following suggestions here came to mind after reading a fantastic book by the great art historian Michael Baxendon, called something like, for the correct title will be in the paper, something like appreciating 15th century painting or the 15th century eye. And what Michael Baxendon was saying was that in the paintings, in the perspectival paintings of this period, the devices that painters use to enable just any man in the street to understand a painting because often paintings were used because people couldn't read or write and people wanted to communicate information through the visual imagery. They used a whole lot of different devices that absolutely everyone in the 15th century could do and knew about. So they used dance steps that people used, like they used the intervals of dance steps. They used the proportions and knowledge that people used to choose horses. They used the geometric or models that were used in high school textbooks for measuring the contents of barrels. So in other words, all this kind of common stuff that just everybody knew that you, in other words, you didn't need to be a connoisseur of painting or very knowledgeable in order to really enjoy a painting in the 15th century. So given that it was possible for non-experts to actually interpret the pictorial space of the 15th century by means available to everybody, I started thinking now what are the parallel sorts of things that are available to everybody so that anybody would find it easier to comprehend a hologram. But of course, as we know from all of the amazing examples of hybrids, of analog holograms, digital holograms, CGH, and all the various permutations, you can't put a blanket over a hologram because they all behave in quite a different way. So the first kind of hologram, the holograms with very high resolution, analog holograms, are best suited to, in other words, they often have an analogy to reality as their major point of reference because they have such a high level of iris and millitude, such a high level of reality. I'm showing you this because I'm among family and I consider this work to be pretty hopeless. I made it in 1979 and here I am with Professor Jean Vienneau, the head of the Laboratoire de Physique Optique de Baselso, where I was so fortunate to be able to go and learn from wonderful people, Nicole Avichier and Bernard Carquille, who use the pulse laser. Slide's not that good, but there's a face there hanging where the mirror is and in the hand base and instead of water, there's a mirror which reflects the light above the hologram mirror and shows a pair of hands washing themselves. But look, this is the first time I use the mirror. So we're looking at the mirror. This is another work. I was happier with this. It was a portrait of this woman, Margaret Carnegie. It was a double exposure and I used the mirror in a similar way that Velasquez used in the painting of Las Maninas to reflect the subject outside of the picture. So when you look at Margaret Carnegie's hologram, when you stand where she is now, you realize she's standing right next to you. She's reflected from a mirror within the composition. This work I'm happier with, more recent work, is a hand in boss rainbow hologram into bronze. The hologram is actually integral into the bronze surface. Playing back the message which Didi Yong mentioned this morning about the magic mirror and the actual kind of reinstating in a personal way the holographic technology obliterating the mirror image rather than being a secret image, the hologram image is there and actually spoils the ability of you to look at yourself in the reflection. So again, the reason why a mirror is a very good kind of analogy is that we understand that the edges of mirrors will crop, that the reflection will not go past them. And I often use this as a kind of a language because the picture plane is an important thing to make obvious and definite. And here is a slide showing how if the film was not flat, how it just wouldn't work. This is the film version of the hologram I made for the installation to absent friends which has several laser transmission holograms which replace mirrors in a bar room which show the events of a new year's eve party each mirror reflecting the bar room at a different time. So this is Ag for Film. I also recorded all the holograms on Kodak plates which were made specially for me and for me it was a far better solution because the flatness of the picture plane as a mirror surface was absolutely essential to this work. This work was commissioned by Robert and Janet Holmes Accord. So now I'm going to talk about some of those other things. So that series of works had to do with using the mirror as an analogy. This, I'm starting to suggest that the lighting, the replay lighting of the hologram can sometimes show theatrical kind of effects. This is a photograph of the finished hologram. This is made by Geola and it's from Computer Graphics. There are two things here which are used. The phenomenology of the actual light field, in other words the light that you stand in and that you're surrounded by when you see a hologram is another factor which is very unique to the hologram. I mean every other work, it's not just a hassle having to have the light in the right place. Using the light in a particular place actually puts light onto the subject or puts light onto the floor or, you know, and a lot of artists have played with this kind of thing. In a transmission hologram that I made for a Catholic church, the light coming through the hologram illuminated the viewer's chest and made the viewer feel very special. So the actual physicality of the replay lighting is rarely acknowledged but in this work you can see the kind of ray of light on the figure. This ray of light actually is an image of a ray of light which occurs where the replay lighting shines onto the figure. This composition we heard earlier today about reversal in animation. This animation begins with a light figure on a dark ground and ends with a dark figure on a light ground. The other thing about this, it takes advantage of the smearing of light into its different spectral hues and of course the difference in the position of the different, the red, green and the blue light, the further it goes out from the holographic plate. So I intentionally filled up the entire volume of space with small particles so that each of these particles, when they became further from the holographic plate, would actually become rainbows. So as they spread apart they would blur to actually fill out the space. So here I'm saying we have a kind of a theatrical device at our disposal which also like many others who love to champion things which are often thought of as a problem and something that needs to be fixed to make things more real. I mean by the way, the reading of imagery is a completely different kind of operation than the reading of real things and it's very rare that a holographic artist put forward their hologram as though it's a real thing. The holograms are images and the knowledge of reading imagery, theatrical imagery, film imagery comes into play. This is the computer graphics, one single computer graphic frame from which that other hologram was made that I showed you earlier. You also notice a high use of transparency. I tend to use a great deal of transparency in my work. Okay, here is again the use of the replay light. This is the computer graphics of pretty similar, pretty close to the last image for a portrait I made of Art Patron Anne Lewis. It was commissioned by the Newcastle Region Art Gallery and supported by the Australia Council and also the friends of Anne Lewis who chipped in the money. This is the computer graphic visualisation done by Graham Olson who I work with on many projects. The way in which I composed this hologram was as three stencils for the red, the green and the blue master hologram. The background eventually became red and blue rather than red and green so it only had one colour in it and each of the glasses lenses were made by superimposing just two colours and then of course the white had all three colours. I did this in order to generate an enormous amount of energy around the eyes to make the portrait really live so you can see that the hologram actually looks a hell of a lot more exciting than the computer graphics for the hologram. I say this John Perry was just so fantastic in making this hologram but I must say that I intentionally made him move the stencils and deregister them on purpose. He was quite horrified when I told him that I wanted to have the effect of the corona of colours all around the edges so obviously the red and the blue master were shot to match otherwise the lines in the background wouldn't have matched up but the green master was offset and slightly sized incorrectly so that there would be a lot of energy and a lot of exciting colours being mixed as the view moved around in the space so that the kind of dynamic of movement no matter what it was generated something new and exciting. Of course it's a big fat joke on anaglific imagery because of course a hologram doesn't have to be anaglific but yes it is a stereogram. The first stage is computer graphics and the second stage is analog so these images show some of the beautiful colours that are mixed by having this superimposition which kind of reminds one of anaglific imagery. This optically formed fringe digital hologram was made by zebra imaging and rather than using a soft kind of dissolve to incorporate three images this had the, it was a three channel hologram with very strong and severe wipes because this was a research hologram designed to research if it was possible to make in three dimensions the way in which Leonardo Da Vinci, Chiotto and Massaccio used darkness in their compositions. Now thanks to using Maya for the graphics for this I was able to actually make a negative light and for the first time actually making shine I don't, can't think of a better word but Leonardo Da Vinci had this idea that darkness was like light that you could shine it onto things and it was in his writing so thanks to Maya's programming I would make a negative light and shine it onto this figure so that the figure kind of disintegrated in a kind of darkness and for this the Chiotto image I, Chiotto had this kind of way of modelling the figure now often known as modelling tone where anything which is perpendicular to the picture plane is the lightest and as the angle of the three dimensional form turns around it becomes darker so in order to make that true for every viewer rather than the image changing to look at the viewer like the eyes of the figure moving I, the camera was organised so that the light on the figure emanated from the cap to camera no matter where the viewer's eyes were so from up high or down low wherever you looked at the hologram it seemed as though the light was coming from you so this places the viewer in a very unique uniquely holographic and digital hologram situation and that is it constructed the viewer as though they were a light rather than looking at something and saying oh aren't they beautiful aren't they a light it actually made the viewer realise that in fact they were illuminating the hologram that they were in fact a light and this is really the kind of, this is the kind of effect that I think Giotto was trying to get at with his frescoes. Now here's another kind of a thing completely different, five minutes, yep I can do it in five no worries. This is a recent work done at the Holos Centre and it's called a Hologram for Mr Spielberg and this is part of the reappropriation of holographic icons and legends and I decided much like the Joseph Boyce hat idea and the Regreet hat idea that after Van Gogh's idea of doing a hologram is a portrait of someone as a chair so this was done at the Holos Centre and I wanted to actually record a genuine holographic special effect, the pseudoscopic image. This is what I wanted to do okay. I wanted to first of all, so this is H1 to make a hologram upside down of a director's chair, to get the H1 and to play it back on this thing. So this funny device made out of all of these crazy, the bottoms of those mirage toys which are marketed as holograms so I got a whole like 50 of them from the factory stuck them onto this parabola and what I was going to do, see the developing tray up there had a deionizer to make a smoke machine and what I wanted to do is put the hologram on the floor and project the pseudoscopic image into the smoke in the space and have the director's chair, a pseudoscopic image of the director's chair floating in smoke reflected by all of the parabolic mirrors okay. Well as we well know what you want to do and what you wind up doing can be quite a different thing so with a little help from my friends, especially Anna Maria, I have to thank the crew, the wonderful, wonderful crew, all of them pitched in and helped me and said well come on Paula we've got to figure out what we can do so we went back and hung the chair up the right way within this structure and then remade the hologram, I called the hologram for Mr. Spielberg because it actually is a real hologram but then I was thinking about this whole kind of culture of the making of so in other words when you get a DVD movie you always get another DVD that shows you how this great genius actually made this fantastic film and I thought that really fitted in with Steven Spielberg and Martina so beautifully mounted the little hologram because we made a test hologram with a piece of foam board where the pseudoscopic image was meant to be to see if it was the fact that the smoke wasn't big enough or if the idea wasn't ever going to work and sure enough there was a pseudoscopic image on the piece of foam board so it would have worked if I could have got enough smoke but we couldn't have that sort of thick theatrical smoke because it would have wrecked the laser so I decided to make a separate little work called the director's cut, scene one and scene two and so this separate work called the director's cut, the first cut is of course the chair upside down hologram that I made and the second one is a little tiny hologram of the entire scene with all of these strange mirage toys with the pseudoscopic image and so that kind of feeds into what people understand about movies and the making of and kind of also shows the holographic process is one of oh yeah and so there's a photo just in one colour of the finished hologram with the smallest amount of pathetic smoke ever and very finally something I'm working on at the moment which I think artists, a lot of artists will like once I get it right is I've been working with a fantastically brilliant team of people who are writing software to enable it to be possible to draw three dimensionally using tactile feedback using this haptic device known as a phantom which was developed at MIT, it's commercially available and so you can draw something and then because you can save it as an OBJ file or you can save it as a JPEG file, you can save it in any format but because you can save it as an OBJ file you can actually play it out hopefully in the future as holographic video which is made from the computation of the hologram and eventually you'll be able to draw in real time and seeing as one of the major problems and by the way I think that it only makes sense to have the image projected in front of the screen rather than straddling that's my own personal opinion although I'm doing some tests at the moment excuse me if the placement of imagery in different parts so I, this sphere and this kind of light is uncharacteristically formal this is just a screen grab but the thing around it, the menu is completely fictitious and made up strictly to guide the viewer psychologically to read the holographic space of holographic video and I'll just explain that we all, this is one of the things like in the 15th century people knew about horses and dancing well everyone knows about computer screens, everyone knows about movies, everyone knows what a cut is, what a dissolve is, everyone knows what a star is, everyone knows so this computer menu has text up the top, it has icons down the bottom which are placed exactly at zero position on the Z axis so that it locates and makes sense of the holographic screen but these kind of funny telegraph, telephone pole things going down the sides are derived from road signs and arrows which keep the viewer's eyes in and there's a new version of that which has the double posts but I'm just ending on this slide of Venice and it's very funny that after I designed this menu and the second design was going to have double barbers poles one behind one another so that when you got both posts behind one another you were looking front onto the image as a kind of locator as I was going along the Grand Canal in Venice from the Biennale I actually saw that this has been for centuries the way in which they use the location of space for gondolas to arrive at the wharf and to kind of be in the right place so I end on this note that really out there in the real world and everyday life are all kinds of visual clues which will make it easier for people to understand holograms and I hope these ones I presented can be helpful. Thank you. Thank you.
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It is well known that in order to reconstruct a holographic image with spatial accuracy it is necessary to reply the hologram from the same distance, angle and use same wavelength in which the hologram was recorded, however sometimes this is not desirable. Features such as the unavoidable blurring caused by the spectral smearing of white light the further it travels from the hologram film plane and the change in size of adjacent image elements when reconstructed in various parts of the replay white light’s spectrum can all contribute as positive elements of an artistic composition. Similarly the reconstruction of white light holograms with replay sources which include a high proportion of wavelengths which do not match the original laser wavelengths and laser transmission holograms played back in one or multiple wavelengths differing from their original recording wavelength, which thereby introduce a high level of noise, can also provide interesting effects. This paper investigates these ideas though looking at examples of recent art works by Paula Dawson which exploit the visual properties which arise from chromatic aberration, blur and spatial distortion eg. ANN rainbow stereogram from computer graphics, Luminous Presence, reflection Synfography and A Hologram [for Mr Spielberg] optical laser transmission.
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10.5446/21884 (DOI)
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Okay, the title, Zip Sister and the Smoking Gun. Zip Sister comes from my website, which is zipsisterholography.com. Some of you may be wondering where that came from, so I'll just let you wander on and continue wondering where that came from. The Smoking Gun relates to the holography cameras that I've built over the last 25 years in an effort to make long holograms but exposing them in sections. And so I've developed this technique for building photos that enables me to expose it in sections and then develop it at a much later time. So in this quick presentation, I'm going to talk about those smoking guns or those holograms and talk about the fun that I've had in making those large holograms. Some of them have succeeded, some haven't, but I've learned from that. And in recent times in the last two or three years, I've started to concentrate on the themes associated with the activities of online gaming, mobile conversations, SMS messaging, and that whole networking world of Facebook and Twitter. From 1983 to 84, I was doing my master's degree in holography as a visual art. And I was very quickly drawn to making large holograms. It just seemed like it was more challenging and more fun and realizing initially after making small holograms the potential that larger holograms seemed to present in giving you more viewpoints, etc. So I was immediately drawn to that. And after I made a couple of meter by meter and a half plates, and those images are in the proceedings papers, I then also had a roll of Ag for Film, which was 30 meters by a meter, and was very keen to make a large hologram using some of this film. And so this was my first holo camera, and you may not be surprised to know that it didn't win any sculpture awards. However, it was functional and the way it worked was that the width of the aperture in the middle of the camera was one meter by 25 centimeters, and there was a door at the back. I could open it up and I could load the film in the top compartment. I could wind the film down and there was a roller compartment in the bottom and attach that and I could expose it in sections. And this one actually was for a hologram called Square Rainbows. And in this particular case there were 12 exposures. At that time I was using Ag for Film, and one of the things I liked about Ag for Film was that I could expose it at a certain time and then process it a day or two later and the image was still fine. I'll talk about that little later where I tried that with some of the more recent films and I had to modify my processing techniques to make sure that I still had an image there and it hadn't disappeared. So at the back, as I said, the door just opened up, enabled me to wind the film down. There was a bit of foam on the back of the door and the aperture had no window, had no glass, but just the pressure of the foam on the back of the film enabled the camera to stabilise the film. At that time, with the two previous plates, I was actually, and my whole thesis was on inline holography. I was very much about simplicity. While I was interested in making large holograms, I was also interested in making them very simple. And so I would simply use one single beam, one spatial filter, and it was just a combined object reference beam, which was perpendicular to the aperture. What I used was a fairly simple object simply because it was just lying around the engineering department at the time. It was one of those grids that goes on top of, or on fluoro light settings where normally you might have four fluoros in the ceiling and then they would have this metal grid frame that would be covering those fluoro lights. So I saw that, thought that was a really good object because it just happened to fit the aperture that I had in my camera. And during the exposures, on one exposure, I would have the grid right up against the film. And at other times, I would place it maybe 10 centimeters from the film and even one meter from the film. When I played it back, especially the part on the very right hand side where the frame, the grid frame was right up against the film, because it's an inline hologram, you actually get both images. You see them simultaneously. There's projecting out the back and out the front. And the image that projected on either side was only projecting a couple of centimeters. However, because it was totally distorted, which is what I was after, when you actually lighted up the images that recorded the frame being about a meter or so from the film, actually gave an image that projected 20 or 30 meters out from the hologram. So when you lit it up, you stood back about 50 meters from the hologram and you walked in front of it and you suddenly had these great flashes of color that would flash in front of you. So it was a fairly simple image, but it proved that I could make larger holograms within a fairly tight optical train and very confined equipment and facilities and that it worked. So that was 1984. I then went to Glasgow and I was a research fellow at the Strathclyde University at the time when Ronald Reagan had his Star Wars dream and the Americans were pouring lots of money into universities to find out how to make a defense shield. I happened to be working there at the time and I built another camera because I still had lots of film over. I basically went into the university and said, I've got this big roll of film, I can make big holograms, can I use your laser? And they were quite generous about that and gave me a job. This may not look totally sharp. This how this was different from the previous camera that I had built was that I had an aperture at the back as well because unlike the first one which was an inline hologram, this was a traditional off-axis hologram. So I had to be able to see, I'd made some master holograms down at the Royal College of Art in London with the help of Nick Phillips and Rob Mundy. And I had these 12 pulse laser portraits that I wanted to juxtapose and make a 15-meter hologram which had 60 images, 50 centimetre each. And the camera had two apertures that would cover up one half of the film and expose the 50 centimetre area and then when that was happening I did the other one. Unfortunately, this didn't work because while I was setting up for the final or the beginning of all the exposures, somebody had come into the laboratory and was talking to me and I forgot to replace a baffle that was actually a light baffle that was behind one of the reference beam spatial filter. I didn't know that at the time, I was very excited thinking it was all working. And I finally exposed the film to the 60 images and then of course I was confronted with that big problem of how am I going to process such a long roll of film. My solution was just to mop in a bucket and I just put developer in the bucket and I would certainly just mop it on every now and then, hold my foot on the hologram to make sure it didn't move down the floor and I kept going like that. And I finally processed it. When I'd finished processing it and washing it, it looked like there was a big water bed that had just exploded on the floor. Fortunately, this was about four or five o'clock in the morning so I had about three hours to clean it up before all the engineering professors and that came in to have a look at their lab. But it was when I went to light it up with white light that I noticed in the middle of all the images was the silhouette of a spatial filter and a spectral image which looked really nice but it wrecked the hologram and that was on every image. So the camera worked but the hologram wasn't a success. After all that, I decided to come back to Australia. I got a teaching degree and then decided to work for a living and was quite happy with all the holidays I would get as a teacher. And I started at this phase of going off to various countries and producing holograms that the subject matter related to some aspect of the culture of that country and I would take holograms there and one of them was in Acapulco where I made a five meter hologram and took that and that was the next or number three of my holocameras. I did this to them, Seoul, I went to Japan or I went to Easter Island, went to Havana and various other places and one of them was Acapulco. To give an example of the sort of hologram that I did when I went to Japan, I did a piece called The 36 Views of the Holographic Self which was based on Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji on his prints and the idea there was that in fact he produced more than 36 but it's known as 36 Views and it was a view of Mount Fuji but from different areas around Tokyo and around Japan. So what I did was I took a pulse laser portrait and I cut it up into 36 pieces and put each piece in a little envelope knowing that each one of those laser holograms actually showed the whole of me, the way you would see the whole of Mount Fuji and I distributed those 36 pieces around Tokyo just leaving. Envelopes all over the place. So it was a good way of showing that holography in terms of a small part shows the whole but the bigger the part, the more views you've got fitted in nicely with an aspect of in this case Japanese culture and Japanese art with a very famous piece. So I decided I wanted to go to Acapulco for a holiday so that sounded really good. One of the things that interested me was a lot of the historical archaeology that goes with the Aztec cultures etc. So I decided to make a 5 meter hologram that's 5 meters by 10 centimeters and I built a small camera and the imagery was going to be, instead of archaeological artefacts, it was going to be tourist artefacts, things like sunglasses and just money and credit cards and sun lotion etc. It was at this point when I went to make this hologram that I realised that if I was using some Slavic film and I found that if I made a hologram one day and if I cut it in half and I processed it immediately it was fine. If I left it for 24 hours there was virtually nothing there. So what I ended up doing, there was just another processing challenge, was that I used some techniques of late intensification but after I had exposed made 10 images, 1 meter, I then took the film out of the camera and I processed that meter without getting the rest of the film contaminated with the chemicals, dried it etc. and then put it back into the camera, exposed another meter and kept going until I finished, finally I had my 5 meter image. These are some of the images just from that. Okay, then we catch up to 2007 where I start getting very, very interested in mobile phone conversations. It's the only language in the world SMS messaging which was actually created by youth and is imposing it on the rest as opposed to language always being something that's created by the older people and is imposed on the youth. So this was the other way around. So I was very much interested in mobile phone conversations and the way people use mobile phones. So I decided that I wanted to do a 9 meter hologram mainly because the film comes in 10 meters and I like to do some tests with the actual film that's part of the same stock so that's why I was anticipating using 1 meter for tests. So with this camera I was going to produce 30 pulse portraits. I've actually brought this hologram here to the symposium so I'll be able to see it for a long time. When it was successful and I lit it up with 30 laser diodes but I've just brought one laser diode that we can still see the images. Fortunately I also had some film of exactly the same size that actually was faulty so I was able to use that to help build this camera. Because it was going to be pulse portraits I knew that I wasn't going to have any stability problems so I didn't need any glass front or back. All I had to make sure was the camera was fairly sturdy and gripped the film reasonably tightly. Even though the film is 36 centimeters wide the actual image is about 30, 32 centimeters and there's a couple of centimeters top and bottom that helps grip. Again like the other cameras that I had built there was a compartment that had the film and then there was a take up and going past an aperture. So it was fairly simple but I wanted to be fairly snug so that it wasn't too heavy to take to New York. When I was talking to Anna at the Holocentre which is where I went to do this she was very alarmed because she wasn't quite sure how I was going to process a 9 meter roll of film. I'm not sure whether she heard any stories about my time in Glasgow but anyway she was very worried so I had to reassure her. The way to do it because the dark room facilities were quite small at the Holocentre I designed and built a frame. There's some rubber rollers and they actually rotate and the idea was that the film would come over the top of the frame and you would actually weave it around all the rollers and it would come up and you could join it and it would overlap by about 5 or so centimetres so you had some leverage there. The idea was that when the film would go in the developing tank is that I could actually grab hold of the film and just move it a little bit so that there would be some movement in the developing process as opposed to maybe just lifting it up. It used 100 litres of DERL developer by the way. I never asked Anna what she did with it afterwards I was too scared to. I think when I left it wasn't a big wheelie bin that was just full of liquid. So this was a way of processing probably more sensibly a really large, long piece of film within a very confined area. I had a few chemical resistant tanks, plastic tanks built that I could use for the developer and one for the washing or bleaching cycle. What I was hoping was going to be the bleaching cycle. Thankfully for the assistance of Martina and Sam and Anna at the centre it worked out well. It took up the whole gallery when we were drying it. There is a video I didn't include in it but Sam graciously was filming and so we actually did have a video of me while the shooting was taking place and the whole developing process and all the drama that was involved in doing that. I just got onto the next image. In 2008 for about three or four months I exhibited it. I actually had it laminated. Technically it's not absolutely perfect. There were some blemishes in there. I think the main problem that I realised was what I discovered later. We used EDTA bleach and there are some scuff bleaching marks and I read later on a paper I think by Nick Phillips that suggested that if you were using that bleach you should really not agitate. You should just leave it there. That was his recommendation. But anyway it served the purpose. There are all these 36 images and you will see all of them in the next slide. What I did was actually because I was trying to show a conversation between two people and I was using text language which is what you can read. The yellow line going around the image is for one person speaking and the white line is for the other person. It's quite a mundane conversation. It's one of my pet loves. I love the way you ask people about conversations. As a teacher I often ask my students about their conversations. They can never remember what they talked about yesterday but they just need that technology and they just need to know that they're communicating with somebody. Quite often I say, hi, how's things? What are you doing? I say, you rang me up a half an hour ago. But the mobile phone technology is very important to them. I was latching on to that notion that you can have this lengthy conversation. It's a conversation between a man and a woman and it's only later when you get to the end if you manage to read it that you find out it's actually a married guy having a relationship with this woman. She just wants almost this reaffirmation that she's still part of his life and she's sort of annoying him at work and he's trying to get back to work. If you look at the faces which actually start at the top and what you see the first bit of text is is the ring tone. Then you get these conversations and in the proceedings papers I've actually all the text is there for you to read. But if you look at the faces from the top to the bottom you notice they swing one way and they swing the other way. So it's like a metronome showing that there's a passage of time happening. And someone once said to me, why have you got so many images that seem very similar? It's such a long hologram and I said, well that's actually the point. The point is that I've gone to this expense and there's trouble and I took about 12 months planning to make a hologram that showed that a lot of these conversations are so sort of, you know, there's not much into them and it's a very, it's for some people it's a very important part of their life for other people. It's like, you know, just get to the point, you know, tell me what you want to talk about. And so it's really going from one extreme to show another extreme. It's lit up with 30 laser diodes. If I just go back. You just see at the top there just above the hologram, there's 30 individual diodes. There are about 80 milliwatts each. I bought those from a company called Amatronics. And they just nicely, because they're a whole laser module, they've got the optics, they've got everything in them. And they also made up for me the continual series line with all the pieces. And I got them, I told them how to build this so that I could space it evenly. And so each image has its own little laser that just lights up that particular image. However, after exhibiting that for four months and the laser diodes being on night and day for that time, when I exhibited it again recently for a couple of weeks, I found that a couple of the diodes had already died. And a couple were sort of on their last legs. So what I've decided to do and what I will be doing in the near future is instead of having the 30 laser diodes, which becomes a bit of a pain to sort of really hook up and arrange, I'm just going to have one generic 300 milliwatts. I could get green, I can get red diode laser. It doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be temperature controlled, of course. It can mode hop as much as it wants because it will still give me the image. And I'm going to break up that one laser beam with 30 microscope slides and just have a little lens. And it'll all be in situations such that if the laser diode dies, I just have to replace that one laser. And it'll be cheaper, they're about $250 as opposed to $4,500 that I spent on the 30 individual diodes. So you learn as you go along. So that's what I'm going to be doing with that. And the slides will just simply enable me to split up the beam and split up the beam and split up the beam. And I'll just have a little lens, probably a concave lens that will just quickly expand it. My next hologram that I'm planning to do will be a kilometer long. I know some of you are thinking, where's the challenge in that? However. This was the prototype of the camera. Last Wednesday and Thursday, I built it. So that's what it actually looks like. I'm going to be using some film. I'm using green sensitive slavic film that's 20 meters by 3.5 centimeters. And I'll need 50 rolls. And there'll be 1,000 exposures. And I must be very patient. So I built that last Thursday and Friday, and I decided to use a total cover. Instead of having the little boxes as you see in the previous ones, I felt because of the size of that, because the apertures, in fact, the total length is 140 centimeters. I thought it may be a bit too flexible because I'm making it out of wood. So I decided to just enclose it as a total box. With the top panel, you'll see that on the top right hand area, there's actually a plate, which has a little swibbled area where I can actually put the roller film over the top. So that becomes the film compartment. You wind out the film. It goes past a meter aperture, and then it will be taped onto the other end. And I can actually just rotate that and it will rotate the film. On that same Thursday night, I did a test exposure of a meter long piece of film because I've got some red sensitive at the same size, and it worked perfectly. And I think one of the reasons why I didn't have any stability problems is because it's such a narrow film, there's a 3 centimeter aperture. So there's a 1.25 centimeter on either side, and I found that it gripped it really, really well because it's quite tight, you can see there's actually six clips that hold that aperture door closed. And then four over the aperture and then two on the very end. So it was quite stable and it worked. What I'm going to be using as a subject matter there is a whole lot of perspex alphabets. And I'm going to have, it's called Hallelujah, one hit wonders, because for every 20 meter roll, I'm going to have a whole lot of song lyrics that are actually made up out of clear acrylic alphabet letters. And the reason being is because I see sites like Twitter and Facebook. And it's very interesting because the people that go on those sites, and by the way, I'm not being critical of them, I think it's quite funny the way people use these blog sites, but the reality is that most of them go on to those sites and initially they use them to contact friends and then a little bit after that they look for some new friends and they may even write off to them and they'll communicate, but they probably don't communicate back. But research shows that very quickly, most of the time that people are using those sites, they're actually using it to find out who they don't want to have as friends, which seems really weird to me. I suppose it could be like shopping, you go out to buy something, but you spend most of your time working out what you don't want to buy, then when you finally buy it, that's the minimal amount of time. But that's the way it is. So I thought that's quite funny. However, I also see that those sites have an underlying element, which is really what this piece is about. And that is that if you go on sites like Facebook, you're looking at three to four hundred million people. Now that is a brilliant lot of people for statistical census information. Now while, and of course people are encouraged on these sites to give out everything about their identity, and it may not be their name, but they talk about all their interests, what films they like, music, etc. And what that really means is that, and while those sites say that this information will never get passed on to any other third parties, I would ask those people to look up the dictionary, look up Hacker. Because those statistics, the value of having three or four hundred million people on a site is just so invaluable to advertisers and government agencies or whatever in terms of knowing about groups of people. And so from my point of view, those sort of sites and all the people that are on there are like music to the ears of those agencies. So that's why I'm going to be doing song lyrics and I'm going to have so many of them because there's so many people on those sites. So again it's just reflecting and commenting on the social networking sites. So I put in for a grant for that and I'm hoping to be able to do that early next year. The camera works, that's the main thing. This is just a few other holograms that are still reflecting on those same themes. These were a couple made with John Perry at Holographic North, some meter square stereograms. The one on the left we need to talk. Both of them, the text suddenly appears or appears one letter at a time as you walk from left to right. The one on the left we need to talk after I got the hologram from John, I then went and got a whole lot of adhesive stencils and cut them up and I put some other text on both sides. So you actually have to walk around on both sides of the image to read the text, which is what happens in a mobile conversation. There's usually two people involved. The one on the right, the gamer, that's a reflection of people who like online games or like gaming. I'm a bit of a gaming fanatic myself so I'm certainly not being critical of it. But one of the things that I know is how addictive that sort of technology can become. And there is on record a case of someone that died after playing games for four days. They were just so addictive they actually forgot to eat, drink, whatever. And so what actually happens in the background of that image, you see that there's what's written as some chalk images of friends, family, and even the whole universe that in the gamers or online gamers point of view, they just get reduced to flat cardboard type figures. They just don't even exist. They just totally become oblivious to it. They get so involved in the game, which I said is fine. It's just a reflection of that I'm sure the person that died is obviously a really extreme case. But it becomes very addictive and I suppose like anything, it's knowing when to stop and when to enjoy it. These are some images using Joel's mobile phone technology. The one on the left, again commenting on the situation of online and chat rooms, etc. And the first one is serial bloggers where I use three images. And I didn't do anything to those images. I simply did, just made some mobile phone images of three friends of mine. Well, they look kind of shady, but I thought they fitted in. And then I put in a whole lot of blogging sites. There's about two or three of those that actually exist, the rest I just made up. And the one on the right, of course, that one, after I made a mobile phone image or video, short video, I then changed it with video editing program. And because that's about chat rooms and the dangers, while chat rooms can be okay, there's obviously a danger that many people are familiar with, where especially young teenagers, young children, especially women, can be coaxed into believing everything that someone says on the other end of the emails, etc. And so that's what that's in reference to. And of course the image, I changed it so that the sheep that you see behind, so it's almost like the wolf in sheep's clothing. So through the image, you actually see these images of sheep as you swivel across, so I'm a nice man, but am I a nice man? This is not in the paper, but if anyone's interested, this is the developer that I've used for the last couple of years now. I use it for all the holograms. It lasts a long, long time. It's fairly simple. Most of those ingredients you can buy at the local supermarket. It's very, very clean working and I just use a normal chrome bleach, but I use that on transmission, laser and reflection holograms. And I find, especially with reflection holograms, if you're doing dentistry or holograms, it's very, very active. Just in summary, because we're almost there, just some current projects, the Hallelujah one, which you know about. In October, a couple of months time, I'm going to enter RMIT. I've got another 10 meter roll of film under my arm, and I'm going to use the camera again that I used in New York to make another 9 meter hologram, but this time I'm going to be doing a one step white light transmission imagery. And what I'm using as the focusing lens is actually a flat, fronell lens from an overhead projector, which I've used before and works quite well. And I'll be using an 8 watt argon, so it'll be fairly small exposure times I'm expecting. But I will probably end up putting a sheet of glass or maybe some backing that will stabilize at least the back of the film. I try if I can not to put glass in front because I don't like to lose that power and all the reflections and internal stuff that can happen. Then you've got to go to the problem of index maxing fluid and all the rest of it, which really is a real pain if you're working with long rows of film. The other one is a work to be installed at the Canberra International Airport. They're building a new terminal, they're actually extending the runway to make larger planes land. And it was supposed to happen this year, but because of the money problems, the recession that we had to have, they've postponed it. They are going to build it next year, but it's just been put off this year. And that's called 1000 States of Emergency. It's going to include 1000 embossed holograms. The reference to the 1000 is that in Australia, triple zero is an emergency dial number. You dial triple zero and that gets you the police or the ambulance or anybody that cares to pick up the phone and help. And so there's going to be 1000 embossed holograms and they're going to be arranged in a huge 3D SOS message. And there's two sides of that too. There's the States of Emergency of people who are in airports like you and I. And also there's that general state where an airport is almost a state within itself and we know of all the potential threats of terrorism, etc. So it's looking at those two aspects. The image that will be of a mobile phone and what it will read is call me, but behind that, excuse me, will be a whole lot of emergency messages that people might send out to other people in the airport. And another one, which is not really related to the theme as such, but my namesake, Dr. David Warren, who's about 80 or so now that invented the Black Box Flight Recorder. I was very keen to make a hologram with him because we had so much in common. He was also a teacher. He taught at a school similar to the school that I'm teaching at now. And then when I met him, he actually told me his son's birthday is also the same date as my. So it was really sort of kind of freaky. And he's about 86, but very sort of agile. And so I took a whole lot of high definition video and filmed, made lots and lots of runs with that with him. In the end, I'm hoping to, I put in for a grant, I'm hoping to make a large scale hologram through Geol and end up sending them the high definition video. With a lot of distortion in the imagery, I'm certainly not after a really nice looking portrait. I want some of the imagery to be able to be recognized, but other to be distorted because I want some elements of his portrait to reflect the purpose of the Black Box Flight Recorder, which is information to be gathered from possibly a plane crash or whatever. So there'll be a whole lot of other elements and I'm in the middle of having a lot of fun at the moment using video editing programs and changing and changing. The only other one that's missing there is actually in Christmas time. I'm spending six weeks and I'm jumping on my motorcycle and I'm actually driving around Australia 17,000 kilometers. And I'm going to take my high definition camera with some holograms and I'll do some things along that way. So that's the other trip. So that's it. Thank you, people.
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This paper will discuss my method of producing large scale art holograms using multi-aperture cameras and purpose built film processing frames. In 2007 such a camera and frame enabled the successful exposure and processing of a single roll of film containing thirty pulse portraits and measuring 900×36cm, made at the Holographic Center for the Arts, New York. This hologram was recently exhibited and visuals will be presented of it along with others that display my ventures into digital holography using digital stereograms made at Holographics North and new mobile video i.lumograms from Geola as multi-media artworks. Finally, this paper will discuss my progress in the production of digital holograms using laser diodes and an LCD to transfer computer generated imagery using Poser 7 and HD video. My current themes associated with these holographic artworks include contemporary communication methods of mobile phones and social networking sites.
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10.5446/21885 (DOI)
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Thank you. The act of making art involves taking an idea to its final realization in a material form. Through the hands of the artist, the spirit of the muse reveals itself in the final object. The viewer does not need an intellectual understanding of the work to be moved by it. All that needs to be there should be there within the object itself. Written critical interpretations can certainly add another dimension, but the experience of art is primarily emotive. Artists who make art objects have watched their work lose validity with those curators and critics who make up what we call the art world. Furthermore, if the object looks like something that actually exists, it is still termed realism and too often viewed as inferior to abstraction. A preference for certain styles can be attributed to the fashion of the times, but in this case the devaluing of the object has persisted and is pervasive in other aspects of our society as well. Over time, there's been a subtle shift in how we value the work we do with our hands as opposed to the work we do with our minds. The prevailing notion is that craft and intuition are of the body, our base ourselves, while abstraction and rational thought are products of the superior mind. This paper is the defense of the material object and all of its unsubstantial, immaterial and irrational properties. In this version, I presented a longer version of this paper for the proceedings, but right now I'm just going to give you a brief presentation of images of my own work and the objects that I make. I've painted objects, photographed them, created them from clay and made holographic replicas of objects. Some I find, others are given to me, rarely do I buy them. Those that have been around for a while acquire histories and personalities of their own. If atoms and electrons are in a constant state of flux, cannot an object acquire properties from those who possess it? Poets and artists give life to objects, granting them human characteristics. In certain cultures and in myth, the souls of the deceased dwell in objects. I will first show you a few examples of the painting I do. This is primarily the work I'm doing right now. This one is called Elemental. My painting is generally representational. That means I use a recognizable image, one that can easily connect to the viewer through metaphor and symbol. My audience has no need of a special language to look at my art. It works on different levels of interpretation and response. In some ways my paintings are very sculptural in the same way that my holography is sculptural. I'm very concerned with the texture of objects, the material qualities, whether it be paper and buckets, containers. This piece is called Alchemy. It's about the same size as the other one, about four feet across. In speaking about my work, it's hard to avoid using the word real. This word is practically meaningless. It no longer conveys information. If someone speaks of realistic painting, he's probably using an obsolete language created in the 1950s for a confused public looking at modern art. If you preferred abstract art to realism, you were a more discerning buyer. Now the words real and abstract are merely keywords or tags. Any information that was once there was further compressed and categorized for internet search engines. What am I trying to say through my objects and through my art? For 30-some years I've attempted to approach reality by creating illusions. Perhaps all artists, and especially those working in holography, are illusionists who like to fool people. Then as most of us are also political, we like to point out how easily people can be fooled. I make objects and then I create environments for them. In my holography, the setting is usually a wooden box filled with other objects and images. This is one of a series of clay figures that I used as models for the first holograms that I made at an artist in residency at the Museum of Holography in 1991. Later that summer I rented Doris Vila's lab on Hope Street in Brooklyn, where I produced a series of different image planes all on glass plates. I've used these same transfers in various new works over the years and have made a few more on film, but I could never match the clarity of these first images that I made all by myself, all alone in the dark, in my first serious attempt at holography. I will now show you three recent works. I'm just working on these this summer again. I'm using the last of these transfers, so I'm making new work using, I've made variations on the same hologram for a number of pieces, mainly because I really just didn't have the funds at one point to produce any new work, and I really like the little images that I made at the beginning. In any of these slides where the hologram obscures the contents of the box, I'll show you the box first, then with a hologram as it's a window to this box. So this is a box, it's just with objects and a photo. The box is actually 13 inches high by 17 inches long. It'll hold a 30 by 40 plate on the front, and it's got a depth of 5 inches. Now the little work that I've got in the exhibition is just a photo of this box right behind the clear holographic image. So that was a sample, this is the actual piece that now holds up with the hologram as the window in front. I call this work Economy Box. I just produced this this spring. Each object and image has a history. Who gave it to me? Where I found it. There's part of my personal history in this box. A miniature prayer book that I had as a child. A perfume bottle that I found in a burned out cabin in the Quebec Woods. And a photo of a hallway in a flap off Washington Square. The holographic figure floats a few inches behind the plate. It is either on top of or through the large bone, depending upon the position of the viewer. I use the hologram as a window to all my boxes. These vitrines function somewhat like a three-dimensional collage. Sometimes I use the hologram as an element in a larger construction or installation. But my holograms generally are not works of art in themselves. An individual object always seems to need others to give voice to that greater concept. That more encompassing realm that we call art. I created this installation called Shelf Life. For an exhibition at the Hollow Center in New York in 2007. The figure here is the same size as an 8 by 10. It's behind the plate. It floats through the glass jars. So it's maybe about three inches behind the plate. Just enough that I could put the glass jars in and the figure actually floats through them. This work has complex personal and political origins. It was completed during the Bush years. The time of war and greed. I finally realized that I was growing old. And on top of that I had the feeling that the planet would probably die before I did. I made transparencies of images that I had manipulated and I set them into one of my favorite objects, the glass jar. So these were just transparencies that I mounted on the wall. This was an image from an old photo of my mother. The tree and the sheep were photographed on a trip to the Isle of Wight. And I downloaded a Black Hawk helicopter from the Internet. This work represented a bit of everything in my world at that time. This is my most current work in progress. Again the box, these are three boxes. Each one is 17 inches across, 13 inches high with a 5 inch depth. All these boxes have no back. What you see is the wall. These will be suspended a few inches from the wall to incorporate the shadows of the objects inside. So the holographic image, you'll see it's the golden part. The other things are little objects I've made to put inside the box. I think in this particular transfer, the figure, I think most of these, the figure is really just dissected by the pane of glass. So in a sense I'm using the glass as well as an element in the work. It's a sculpture element. The image is very light and elusive, hardly visible against the white. But I wanted to stress this lightness, clarity and simplicity. I think they are about some stage in our existence, transitional states. Part body, part soul, perhaps a state reached very late in life, perhaps near death. It's a meditative state. For the models for these holograms, I made all of these figures from clay. This figure was taken from a Gauguin painting, a young girl lying on the grass with a fox draped across her chest. Gauguin's title was loss of virginity. I repeated the box, the fox in the second box. The symbolism of the fox is complex, but purely in a formal sense it adds an element of movement and time contrasting to the stillness of a suspended figure. Sometimes I use cats with reference here to Schrodinger's cat and the parallel realities. They also add an element of humor to temper some of the darkness in my work, a lot of which is about death. And this is the last box, which was my title slide. So I used the original model lying on the floor of the box on a little piece of linoleum that came from my parents' farmhouse in Ohio. And that's my version of a prayer mat. And the box I've got out in the exhibit, again the image is dissected by the pane of glass, but in this one, which is a larger one, 30 by 40 centimeter plate, this image actually again floats a couple of inches behind the plate just on top of the actual model. This next series is from the same period, these are a few of the clay figures I used as models. I started making all of these little guys in the late 1980s, but not with a hologram in mind. I just wanted a crowd of them in a room. I think I managed about 50 of them and I gave most of them away. The small torsos are just 2 to 3 inches high. This one little figure in particular seemed to work well in almost any box I made, and I have repeated it in different artworks, and I did bring one along for that as well. Perhaps it comes closest to being my personal icon. And some of them I did pseudoscopically, which was very interesting, the little head just swings, and I mean even though it's pseudoscopic, you still get the same image, but a strange thing happening to the head. So these are all 8 by 10 inches, most with photos and transparencies mounted behind the clear glass. Melissa Crenshaw made my last series of transfers on probably the last 8 by 10 glass plates that existed, and I'm really happy to hear that Elford is starting to make glass plates again. And this is the one I have out here, it's a poem. The words are on a transparency behind the hologram, and then I've got a piece of cloth behind that, a poem of a friend of mine. And this one I gave to Annemarie Nicholson, it's a transparency of your house behind the plate, and then a photo behind that. So you just have that little one inch space where you could add elements as well. So think of them all as, there's always a little bit of space. The ones I brought along have no space, but most of them have at least one inch on the smaller plates, but another five inches on most of the boxes. From the beginning I've used a holographic object as a sculptural entity. It is fragile and fleeting, transparent, weightless. It works well in combination with other elements that have a similar or opposing qualities like glass, or metal, or heavy plaster and concrete. Challenging an old rule of physics, it can and does occupy the same space as another object. Furthermore, it embodies both the physical reality of the original and its altered, transcendent state. The hologram is, in effect, simultaneously the real and the abstract, the body and the soul. I've always had a real job that supported my art making. For many years I worked as a registered nurse part-time in a neurosurgery intensive care unit. There were many ghost stories among the nurses, and one was that when a patient died his spirit rose up, and sometimes you could see the suspended intravenous folds swaying. So you knew his soul was on its way up. This piece was conceived during one late night shift at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. It's called Soap Dish and Lightbulb, and part of a series called Spirits of the House. The holograms are 8 by 10 windows in the little cabinet, and the back wall is covered with 1 inch tiles. So there's enough space for me to insert a real soap dish and a real lightbulb. So here's the lightbulb with the hologram and the soap dish. In this particular one I used to have a little clay body in there, and it was one of Steve Benton's favorite small dead objects he commented on once. And there's the little ghost appearing over the hologram. So the philosophy behind my work seems to be that of a quest to make some sense of the world I live in. This involves filtering information, truth from lie, reality from illusion. One of the first successful artworks dealing with illusion I did in 1985. I found an old painted door lying in the garbage on my street in Toronto, and I produced it on canvas. This all started as an exercising mixing paint and possibly boredom with the landscapes I was painting. The result was quite unexpected. When I finished and propped up the two next to each other, the object and its replica, I discovered that another dimension lay hidden in the intersection of the actual and the virtual worlds. A crack had appeared in my perception of reality, and holography became the means to re-enter that other realm. This is a detail. The door is on the left. The following are a few of my early constructions which reinforced my theme of illusion. Technicians at Fringe Research, Michael Soundon in Toronto produced the hologram of the bowler hat. In this piece, a tribute to Belgian painter René Magritte, I exhibited at the Third International Symposium at Lake Forest in 1988. Each has a hologram of a bowler hat. In the first box, a hologram of a bowler hat floats above two hands holding a painting of an apple. Then I repeated the holographic image in each of the next three boxes. Here one hand holds the apple, and there's another photo with the hologram on top. The transparent hologram is the window to the box, and the brim of the hat protrudes about an inch in front of the image plane. The painted plaster objects are behind the hologram. In the center's hinged box, a hand holds a metal pipe. I cast all these hands with using alginate and plaster from my own hands. Behind the hologram, a mass of tangled wire forms individual words, each spelling the word word. Magritte pointed out the difference between an object, its image, and the word used to describe the object. The message is so simple that we wonder why we need to be reminded that the picture of a pipe is not the pipe, and the image of the painting on the Internet is not the real painting. This one's called No Place. The constructed framework here is a blackboard and shelf approximately four feet long. I cast my own hands again and monrima over the words. The chalk words actually appear to float through one of the rooms in the house. The viewer sees the hologram frontally, but it disappears when one walks to the side. The image is fragile and fleeting, with hands frozen in time, writing words that are not quite completed. For the exile, as well as the immigrant, home exists only as a memory, and perhaps an idealized one at that. There is literally no place we can call home. So in conclusion, the object continues to play a role in my simple reflection, holography, and in my painting. I make objects, and then I create environments for them. I do not work from a well thought out plan. I have no idea what will be the result of taking brush to canvas, hand to clay. The process is one of creating, then destroying, then starting all over again. Eventually the idea emerges, but only through actual work with the medium. Slowly, through my objects, I begin to understand my own language and the world around me. The uniqueness of the medium of holography has been its appeal to the artist, and the scientist, and to the thinker, and the artist. Its magic drew us all in. The digital may transform the technology in usher in another virtual world, but let us hope that in this world we will still value the irrational, the intuitive, and the soul of the artist. We must continue to protect the art spirit that dwells in the things we make with our hands, and continue to search for the real and the truths. Thank you very much.
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The reconstructed holographic object embodies both the physical reality of the original and its altered, transcendent state; in effect, it is simultaneously the real and the abstract, the body and the soul. When the artist combines the hologram with other elements, creating multiple realms and dimensions, the viewer can glimpse the possibility of a larger, more encompassing reality. This is, perhaps, the experience of Art. The author surveys her own work, beginning with early attempts to simulate three-dimensionality and explore the interfaces between two and three dimensions. Prior to her work in holography, she created trompe l’oeil painted constructions and “vitrines,” windowed boxes that contained objects and layered transparencies. She will discuss her recent paintings and installations in which she continues to use representational images, familiar objects whose allusive nature readily connects to the viewer’s own memory and reality. Through metaphor and symbol, the simple holographic object aids in the exploration of illusion, what is real and what is false, what is permanent about life and what dies.
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10.5446/21888 (DOI)
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Thank you. My name is Chakrabani Meika. This is my first time attending the ISDH conference. I'm giving the talk, Acromite-based photopolymer for multi-color holographic recording. The aim of the project is to develop a acromite-based photopolymer for full-color display applications. So here I'm presenting some of our preliminary results by optimizing, by sensitizing the acromite-based photopolymer at three wavelengths, primary recording wavelengths, and measured reflection holographic recordings, exposure characteristics, and their spectral reconstructions of the multi-color reflection holograms. Outline of my talk is a brief introduction on the acromite-based photopolymer and the photopolymerization mechanism. And then I move to experimental results that are done by recording the reflection ratings individually at three primary recording wavelengths that I have chosen, and the spectral reconstructions of the hologram that I recorded by combined beam and my summary on future work. To make a full-color reflection hologram, the most important parameters are the experimental setup and the recording wavelengths and the recording materials. So Lipman single beam denisive geometry is the most promising setup that we use for the experimental setup. Here I mixed the three beams by using two dichroic mirrors and then a spatially filtered and illuminated on the recording materials. The chosen recording wavelengths are helium neon 633 nanometers and diode-pompered solid-state laser 532 nanometers and the 473 nanometers. And coming to the recording materials, of course everybody has told that silver-hired photoemulsions and dew-pointed photopolymers and dichromatic gelatin are the most successive recording materials for panachromatic purpose. So here in the process to develop a panachromatic version in acromite-based photopolymer. So basically the photopolymer contains five elements, monomer and a co-monomer and a binder and an electron donor and the dyes. So polyvinyl alcohol which can bind the remaining elements and makes the layer into dry. So finally the layer is a dry photopolymer layer and acromite and ananbiter, mesochromite will be as a monomer and co-monomer for polymer chains. And tritonolamine is used for the electron donor to generate the free radicals. And here for sensitizing the material at three wavelengths, mitharin blue is used for the red region and erythrosine B is used for the green and ecaflavin is used for the blue regions. The composition that I have shown in the table, all the components are mixed in a water solution and they are made on a glass layers and leave it for six or seven hours to get dry. The absorption spectrum of this panachromatic photopolymer system was shown and the having good absorption at these recording wavelengths, red, green and blue regions. Before going to my experiments, I'd like to give you a small explanation on the photopolymerization and the recording mechanism. The photopolymerization mechanism that you can simply move by three steps, that is initiation and the propagation and termination. The initiation process that is starts by absorption of the laser radiation by a suitable dye molecules. Here I have three dyes, so they absorb the recording wavelengths and exerted into a singular state. Some of the molecules will come to the triplet state and react to the electron donor to form radicals. So these radicals will use its unpaid electron and the pi electron from the carbon-carbon double bond of the monomers to become a one of, to leave one of the carbon with the unpaid electrons. The monomer becomes a radical. So this monomer again, I add with another monomer. So this is how polymer chain grows, that is what the propagation steps. And termination is the one by combination of the two radicals of the polymer chains, combines, makes a long chain. So that is how the termination or the long polymer chain forms. And the polymorph of these acrylamide was given in these papers that I referred here. And when the propagation, in the propagation process between the dark and bright regions, the monomers diffuses from the dark to bright regions, so where the density will change between the dark and bright regions, which results in refractive index change that is the, that gives the diffraction efficiency growth in the material. So for the initial experiments, I started my experiment by recording reflection ratings, which the experimental setup that I used was shown here. I mixed the three beams, the same as the Lipman-Deniseux setup, and I recorded these spatial frequencies at three different frequencies. Here I eliminated the recording, the light that I eliminated on the material with a 40 degrees instant angle, which gives a spatial frequency of red and green and blue wavelengths was mentioned here. The refractive index of the photopolymer was 1.5, that is a refractive index. And the exposure, the diffraction efficiency of the material that are done at a different exposure times with the chosen recording time, recording intensities are given here, and that is the diffraction growth of the material at individual gradings. And these gradings are recorded individually. This is not a combined holograms of the RGB. So I achieved the efficiency of 11% in red, whereas in green and 5%, it's around 5% and the 2% efficiency. So then I moved to one of the disadvantages in making a display application or the multicolor applications, that is the dimensional changes in the holographic gradings where you get the shift in the shrinkage, either shrinkage or the swelling process. So for that purpose, I recorded RGB combined holograms and then characterized the grating by using a spectrum analyzer. I used the AFSpec halogen lamp for illuminating the hologram. And the reconstructed beam was collected to the fiber and analyzed using AFSpec spectrum analyzer. And the reconstruction wavelength and the spectrum was shown here. I had approximately 1.1% of the shrinkage and swelling in the material that I observed. And we are in the process to study systematically what's going on the material at each wavelength individually. And I just compared the reconstruction wavelengths with the recording wavelengths by using a CAE chromatic diagrams. And the first diagram that I am showing, the color diagram where I show the, that is a simple geometry where most of the people knows that when you join the three colors, we form a triangle which gives the colors that I can achieve by combining these wavelengths. And the next one I showed the recording area, recording wavelengths, the triangle and the reconstruction wavelengths. So this is the white light reconstruction of the hologram that I recorded on a biological sample. And that is the thickness of the layer was 60 microns. I recorded a 10 euro cent coin and recorded three color holograms separately at different places. This is the white light reconstruction of the holograms that I recorded. And the summary, at this stage we are able to sensitize the material at three wavelengths and study the exposure characteristics of the materials with the initial stage and spectral calculations and could able to record the holograms. So in future we are planning to develop the material, getting a high diffraction efficiency by improving the concentration of the materials and also to decrease the shrinkage or swelling effects by doping the nanoparticles or controlling the humidity of the materials. Finally I would like to acknowledge my supervisors and the professor Benzler from the Clause B. Thank you. Any questions? I have just one question. The type of polyvinyl alcohol you are using is a very low molecular weight, not very hydrolyzed or 85% or what is it? Pardon? That is not disclosed. That is the one I should not disclose the... Oh you are not disclosing it. Ah, right, secret. Thank you.
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Preliminary results of full colour reflection holograms recorded in an acrylamide based photopolymer layer at 633nm, 532nm, and 473nm are presented. Recording material is sensitised to three recording primary wavelengths. Reflection holograms are recorded using a combined single beam of RGB wavelengths, are spectrally characterised and compared with the recording wavelengths using chromaticity diagram. An object of additive colour diagram was recorded. The shrinkage effect of this recording material on reconstructed wavelengths is also discussed.
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10.5446/21606 (DOI)
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Let's see where we left off. All right. So what did we learn last time? We learned that bromination of an alkene cannot go through a carbocation intermediate. We learned that because of this experiment right here. When you run this experiment and you do this reaction with bromine, if it was a carbocation intermediate, you would get anti- and syn addition, and we don't get syn addition. So it means that our proposed mechanism that we came up with on the previous page is incorrect. Because if it was correct, we'd make a carbocation, and we're going to get syn plus anti. So it turns out we only get anti, and you need to remember that. So we've got two new stereocenters. We're going to get anantimers, bromines on opposite sides, so anti-addition. So let me show you a mechanism that is consistent with this stereochemical outcome. And I think, I don't know why it did that. Weird stuff moving around. So you've got that right on your page, so we're just going to keep going. So what we talked about was in the vicinity of the pi bond, that's looking a little crazy. That bromine-bromine bond gets polarized. And so what's going to happen is, and I will probably have to redraw this down here, because you're not going to be able to see what happens. I'll redraw it down here, and it'll look good on your page. All right, so let's redraw this. Why is it doing that? Okay, let's try that again. Let's save, cancel. Oh come on, right now we're already caught up. We can't have this happen again, right? Awesome, look at that. Okay. So I have to redraw this, you don't. I think it's because I took a space out, because things got weren't scrolling right, and I didn't realize it would do that. All right, so we get polarization of the bromine-bromine bond. I didn't leave enough room for this, but let's work on this here. So I'm going to have the lone pairs on this bromine. I'm going to have the lone pairs on this bromine. So go ahead and add, I already have that on there. And let me in a different color so we can see what's going on a little more clearly here. This pi bond's going to attack this bromine. We're going to break the bromine-bromine bond here. And then one of the lone pairs on this bromine that's closest to the alkene is going to come down and attack on the other side. That's what the arrow pushing should look like. So basically what we're doing is we're adding an extra arrow to the previous mechanism that we were proposing. And what that does when you do that, now I get to go back over here. It makes a new functional group that we have not talked about. It's called a bromonium ion. I'm going to keep stereochemistry here of the alkene. And I remember I tilted the alkene to make this a little easier to see. All right so this is what we call a cyclic bromonium ion. Or you can just call it a bromonium ion. So this is a cyclic bromonium ion. And so then what's going to happen next is the bromide ion that we just had leave here in the first step, Br minus, is going to do backside attack. And just like when we, and what this is going to remind you of is an epoxide. Bromonium is going to do backside attack. And so you're going to get inversion of configuration at the carbon being attacked. I'm going to have bromide ion come in and attack from the opposite side. I mean on the left hand side. So boom, this is going to come here. I'm going to have it attack on the left hand side. Both sides are equally substituted so it doesn't matter which side we attack on. Both sides have one methyl group. And if you're able to draw stereochemistry from epoxides this will be very easy for you. So the bromide comes in from the opposite side. So we're going to have Br here. We're going to have Br here. On the left hand side the hydrogen moves up but it's still going back. On the left hand side the methyl also moves up. We'll just do Me here. And on the right hand side it stays exactly the same. So overall that's inversion of configuration. Some students are still having trouble with why that's inversion. All we did of course was to move this methyl up and this hydrogen up. But you can see that it's inversion because in this product right here the bromine is on this side and over here it's on the opposite side. So that is inversion. Just like inverting the umbrella just like we did with SN2 reaction back in chapter 7. And so that mechanism accounts for the fact that we get anti-addition only. We will also get the enantiomer. There's two ways you can form the enantiomer here. I'm going to show you both ways. That will be on the next page. The enantiomer is formed when bromine comes in from the bottom. Let's see what that looks like. So we have this. I'm still tilting the alkene to make the stereochemistry a little bit easier to draw. And so we can have the bromine coming in from the bottom instead. We have the bromine coming in from the top because remember the alkene is planar and so the bromine can come in from the top. That's what we showed on the previous page. It can also come in from the bottom. So that's what we're showing here. So this will give us another opportunity to practice the mechanism for this reaction. So we're going to attack this bromine. We're going to break the bromine-bromine bond. And then one of the lone pairs from bromine, I usually just do whatever is closest, goes right here and attacks the carbon on the other side. So very, very, very reminiscent of epoxides. So there's your cyclic bromonium ion which has a positive charge on bromine and that's going to behave exactly the same as a protonated epoxide. And then I'm going to have bromide ion come in attack on the left-hand side again. So that's one way to get the answer. There's also another way. Bromine ion is going to come in and attack from the opposite side. So I always draw the incoming groups in the plane and then that makes it easier to draw the steric chemistry here. Here's the hydrogen. Here's the methyl. Hydrogen here. There's the methyl. So that's enantiomer. That's one way to get the enantiomer. The other way to get the enantiomer is to have bromine attack on. Draw the same bromonium ion we did on the previous page but have bromine come in from the right-hand side. Because this is equally substituted on both sides, there's a 50% chance the bromine's going to attack on the left-hand side and there's a 50% chance it will attack on the right-hand side. So it can attack on the left. It can attack on the right from this one here. So I had this coming in on this side. We can also have that coming in from the opposite side. So I'm going to redraw the bromonium ion from the previous page. So we already showed how to form that. So from the previous page. And then I can have bromide ion coming in from the right-hand side. We break the carbur bromine bond, kick electrons up onto bromine. That's how it will look like this. Hydrogen going back, just moved up a little bit. Methyl coming forward, just moved up a little bit. Over on the left-hand side we have the bromine on the top and we have hydrogen going back and methyl going back. These two are the same. They don't look like it there but they're the same. They have the same stereochemistry. It's the enantiomer of the one on the left. I guess they do look the same, don't they? Now that I look at it again, all the differences I wrote ME and said are methyl but they are exactly the same molecule. So that's the way that we would show the enantiomer. Thanks, anybody. All right. Important points about halogenation. Unlike a normal carbocation, all of the octets are satisfied in the Bromonium ion. The Bromonium ion has considerable ring strain however and there's a positive charge on the bromine atom so this is a reactive intermediate. It's unstable just like a carbocation is unstable. This is also unstable. Because a carbocation does not form in this reaction, no rearrangements are seen. We're not forming a carbocation. We saw we can't because the stereochemistry tells us we can't form a carbocation. The product results from stereosollective anti-addition to the double bond. The reaction does not work with F2. It reacts explosively nor with I2. It's thermodynamically unfavorable so we're really going to see this mostly with bromine or chlorine. All right so Br2 or Cl2 only. If the reaction is run in water rather than methylene chloride, a different product is obtained as the major product. Let's draw that. So we've got two possibilities. Let's see where we get those two possibilities from. All right notice this is no longer symmetrical is it? The previous example we had a methyl on both sides. This is no longer symmetrical. We have one R group on the right and we have two R groups on the left so let's look at what our possibility is. What we form when we use bromine in water rather than in inert solvent is we get a bromol hydrant so bromine on one carbon hydroxyl on the other. There's two possibilities here. Hydroxyl on the left, hydroxyl on the right. So two possibilities, hydroxyl on the left, on the right and for each of those we would get an enantiomer so there's four possible products here. That would be this plus enantiomer, this plus enantiomer. What do we actually get in this reaction? Enantiomer we don't get any of this. This is called a bromohydrin. For the bromine and for hydration for the hydroxyl. This is going to be a little, we have to explain that result don't we? We're also going to form a bromonium ion in this reaction just exactly like just when you do it with regular bromine. We're going to form a bromonium ion in the second step rather than bromide attacking water attacks instead but it's otherwise it looks the same. So if you think about it we make the bromonium there are two nucleophiles present. Two nucleophiles present can attack that bromonium ion. There's water and there's bromide ion. If bromide ion opens up the epoxide you get a di-bromocompound. If water, not the epoxide, if bromide ion opens up the bromonium ion you get a di-bromocompound. If water opens up the bromonium ion you get a bromohydrin. Since we're using water as a solvent here the concentration of water is much, much larger than the concentration of bromide. Since H2O is a solvent, concentration of H2O is going to be much, much greater than the concentration of bromide ion. So the nucleophile that's going to be mostly attacking is, and I shouldn't draw it that way, let me fix that. We want concentration here. So that means that collision with water is more likely. So therefore bromohydrin is the major product. Even though we have the possibility of forming a visceral di-bromii we don't tend to get that because we've got so much more water than bromide here. So bromohydrin is the major product. So let's draw the mechanism for this. And it's going to look really similar. Once again, to help us with stereochemistry I'm going to tilt the alkene so it's perpendicular to your page. And we still have bromine coming in and we're going to still get polarization of the bromine in the vicinity of the pi bond. So the pi bond is going to attack bromine. We're going to break the bromine-bromine bond. And then one of the lone pairs remaining on the closest bromine is going to attack whatever side is convenient. The zero is coming from the left so I have the arrow coming in on the right hand side. So ethyl on the left going back, methyl coming forward on the right hand side, hydrogen going back, methyl coming forward. This bromine has two lone pairs, two sets of lone pairs and a positive charge. And we saw we got the product where the hydrosyl only came in on the most substituted side so that's the way I'm going to show this. The water is coming in on the most substituted side. Is that reminding you of something? Yeah, it's just like an protonated epoxide and this is going to behave exactly like a protonated epoxide. So if you know your epoxides, this is going to be an easy mechanism for you. So we have water here coming in. Protein is anti to the water that just came in. Stereochemistry on all of the groups attached to the alkene are going to stay exactly the same. So ethyl is still going back and methyl is still coming forward. And then in the last step, water is going to deprotonate the bromohydrin. So if I put this mechanism on the test, which I have many, many times in the past, it's a possible mechanism on the non-midterm too. If I put it on the test, I would only have you show the mechanism for forming one enantiomer. You don't need to form the other one. If you know how to do it once, you know how to do it again and there's no reason for you to do it twice. But the question is how do we get the enantiomer here? Because you're going to form the enantiomer, you have to because you started with achyro reagents, everything is a chiral, you have to get a pair of enantiomers. How do we get the enantiomer here? So we certainly can't have water attacking on the other side to get the enantiomer because that's, we don't get any water on that side, yeah. Yeah, bromine can come in from the bottom. That's how we form the enantiomer. All right, so we're going to write plus E, Br2 comes in from the bottom. All right, so this is very similar to a protonated epoxide and we want to explain why we get this regiochemistry and our explanation is going to look just like the explanation we used for an epoxide. All right, so let me just, just to jog your memory. So if you crammed the day before the midterm, you've forgotten this already, okay? Because you only get, if you crammed, you only retain like what? 5% or something? Okay, so recall, let's compare this. I want everybody to see the connection here. So when we have a protonated epoxide and I said this is going to behave just like a protonated epoxide, water came in from the most substituted side. Hopefully you did that on your test. So this is looking just like that. And what we have in common is we have a three-membered ring here that has a positive charge on it. So this is all old news here. So then we had water and then in the last step we had a d-deprotonated. So hopefully you will see the similarity here. We get the 1, 2 dial. Okay, so, and actually, so we went through an elaborate explanation for why that happens with epoxides. What we did is we drew resonance structures for the protonated epoxide and we saw that there was more partial positive charge on the carbon that was more substituted. We're going to use the same exact explanation here. All right. So two possibilities. We're doing something a little bit unusual here. We're breaking signal bonds, which we don't usually do when we're drawing resonance structures, but it is legal. As long as all atoms stay exactly where they are and we're just moving electrons, it's legal. So that would give us this structure right here. Alternatively, we can break the bond on the other side. If we do that, we get the carbocation on the right-hand side. And so then what we did was we drew the hybrid of the two best. So we took this one and we took this one. And that was best because this is a tertiary carbocation and here this is a secondary carbocation. So then we drew the hybrid. So then we have our hybrid here. And we just did the hybrid of the two best. And so we have a dotted line right here. That's a partial bond. We have partial positive on the bromine, partial positive, and we have partial positive here. And so the nucleophile, in this case our nucleophile is water. Water's going to attack on the most electron-deficient carbon. So that's what we're going to do here. Just like this, it's going to attack on the most electron-deficient carbon. And again, this is the hybrid of the two best resonance structures. All right, and it turns out that when you have unsymmetrical alkene and you're just using bromine, bromine without water, same thing is happening. The nucleophile is attacking on the most substituted side. It's just that we can't detect it. We just can't detect it because since both bromines are the same, there's no way to detect that in this reaction. When it's a hydroxyl, we certainly can. So all I'm saying is that when we have an unsymmetrical alkene, which we do here, we're still going to form a bromonium ion. So I'm going to have the isopropyl here going back. I'm going to have hydrogen coming forward. We are still attacking on the most substituted side. It's just that there's no way to detect that since both atoms are going to be the same. It's on bromination. Anybody? Yes? Oh, yeah, that's right. So yeah, thank you for pointing that. I forgot that. What is it on your version? Is it a hydrogen? Yeah. This should be an ethyl. Change that to an ethyl. Ethyl ethyl ethyl. Thank you so much for noticing that because I completely forgot about it. So on your version, ethyl ethyl ethyl. Otherwise when you go back and look at that, that's not going to make any sense at all. Okay. Let's go out and get some needle eyes here. Catching that. All right. There's one more reaction that we're going to talk about and then we're going to do some synthesis. So we're moving very quickly into synthesis. I opened up Saffling Chapter 10. The last 10 problems are difficult synthesis problems. So I want you to wait until you're ready to go with those 10 problems and you want to really honestly try them. If you get stuck, try to get help rather than, I don't know, what do you do? You guys go online and you find the answers on Facebook page, all that kind of stuff. My son filled me in on all of this. So that's not going to help you because it's something that you need to be able to understand on your own. If you don't understand it, you're not going to understand it on the midterm when it's slightly different. So we'll get to that at the end of class. We might not get to it today, but I want to talk about hydroboration. So it'll probably be Friday. So you may want to wait until Friday to do those last 10 problems. Okay. Hydrogenoborane, so borane is another electrophile that adds to alkenes. When the addition is complete, you add peroxide and base and the boron is turned into a hydroxyl. So this is another way to make alcohols. The difference with this method is that when we hydrate in alkene, we have a Markonikov addition. When we use hydroboration, it's what we call anti-Markonikov. It's the opposite regioisomer. And so both of those reactions are going to be really important to us in synthesis because sometimes we want the hydroxyl on the least substituted side. Sometimes we want it on the most. So we need these two reactions to be able to do that. All right. So let's just give you a little background here. So BH3 and THF. And it turns out we don't really worry too much about the stoichiometry here, but this is a 3 to 1 ratio. So you have three alkenes for every one BH3. And so the BH is going to add to the alkene. And so then what it looks like, it's going to look, so here's what it looks like. I'm going to circle the atoms that we just added. Actually, let me do this. I'm going to mark right here the original alkene. Those are the three carbons. I'm going to mark that right here so you can see that. That's the original alkene. And then the groups that we added on, let's circle those. I'm going to circle the first one here. What type of addition is that? The boron and the hydrogen are added to the alkene. It's a syn addition. And this happens three times. So here's the boron and that. Let's do a different color here for this one. This is the boron here, and that's the hydrogen here. Syn addition. And I'm having too much fun mixing colors here. There's the boron here, and there's the hydrogen. Syn addition three times. So we don't always draw it all out. It's a little bit looking. It looks kind of spidery, and it's a little difficult to see. This is often written in a short hand way. Often written as this. B, R2. Here's the hydrogen that just came on. Here's the boron. And rather than drawing all three groups, we just draw it once. The R2 means that there's two other groups like that. It's just a short hand way of writing it. So this R means that two groups identical to the one shown. So this is the first step. Right here is the hydroboration. The second step. And really important that when you do this as a synthesis and you're filling in reagents that you separate these into two steps. First you do the hydroboration, and then the second step you do basic hydrogen peroxide. And what you get is three of the alcohols. Again, I'm drawing in that hydrogen on the carbon where it just came in. So what we've done is we've done a syn addition of water to the alkene. Do you see that the hydroxyl is on the least substituted side rather than the most substituted side? Hydroxyl is on the least substituted side. So this is an anti-Marconi-Kov addition. It has the opposite regiochemistry of hydration. If you did a hydration, then the hydroxyl would be on this side. Right here are the most substituted side. So this is on the least substituted side. So this is an anti-Marconi-Kov addition. And it's not going to let me go off the edge of the paper. So just go ahead and add your little n there that I left off, anti-Marconi-Kov addition. All right, let's look at a typical reaction. BH3, THF. How do you make BH3? You take B2H6, which is a gas, and you add it to THF. We'll talk about that in just a minute. What that does, step one, step two, basic hydrogen peroxide. So what I'm going to be looking for, you can leave the water off, but I want to see H2O2, and I want to see hydroxide for step two. And as you can see, overall, we have addition of water across the double bond after those two steps. So this is a hydration across the double bond. And we can see if we circle the groups that just came on, we've got this hydrogen and this hydroxyl, syn addition, hydroxyl on the least substituted side. So this is not Marconi-Kov, it's anti-Marconi-Kov. Will we get the enantiomer here? How do we know? Will we get the enantiomer here? So what we said is if you start with things that are achiral, and all reagents are achiral, and there's no chiral influence, if you form new stereocenters in your product, you will get a racemic mixture. You absolutely will get a racemic mixture. In your product, you will get a racemic mixture, you absolutely have to. So our alkene is achiral. This is achiral peroxide sodium hydroxides, achiral, so you will get the enantiomer. And we have graduated now. We're allowed to write just plus E on the test rather than drawing out the enantiomer. This is because you guys are so mature now. I know that you're ready for that big step. Be careful how you wield that plus E though, because some reactions don't have an enantiomer. So if you write the correct product and you write plus E, you don't get any points, because there isn't an enantiomer. And if somebody draws the wrong enantiomer, they get it wrong. So why should you get it right when you write plus E? So be careful where you put plus E. Some people put it on every single problem, and that can cost you. So make sure you know what you're doing. So highly regioselective and stereoselective reaction, antimiraconic of addition of water to an alkene. And so it's opposite the regiochemistry of H2O, H3O plus addition. And so no rearrangements are observed. Now this is one I'm going to show you, the very first part of the mechanism. I will not show you the oxidation. If you are curious as a heck about the oxidation, you can come to my office and I'll show you. So I'm not going to ask you this mechanism on the test, but you do need to know this reaction. You will use this reaction over and over again in synthesis problems. So I'm just going to show you the first part of it, because for some of you, it will help you remember why it's a syn addition. So that's why I'm showing you. All right, so BH3 is a Lewis acid, and therefore an electrophile. You take B2H6 plus, this is THF by the way, tetrahydrofuran. And you can certainly use the abbreviation for THF. You can use THF for in your mechanisms. And what this is going to do is break apart the B2H6 into BH3. So we'll have a positive charge on oxygen. We'll have a negative charge on boron. And that's equivalent to BH3.THF. So that's the shorthand way of writing that. So what's happening here is boron is accepting an electron pair from the oxygen atom of THF. So boron accepts an electron pair, classic Lewis acid-based reaction, from the oxygen atom of THF. Then what happens? Let's show it right here. Pi bond grabs this hydrogen. Let me do that again. I didn't leave myself enough room. All right, in this particular reaction, we don't have the pi bond attacking. We're actually transferring hydrogen with its pair of electrons. So is H minus, is that a nucleophile or an electrophile? It's an electrophile. It's electron-rich. So what's going to happen is, if you look at the polarization of this bond, pi bond does not grab the hydrogen. The pi bond comes and attacks the boron. And the hydrogen boron bond is going to break. The arrow is coming from the hydrogen bond. And the hydrogen is being transferred with its a pair of electrons, so it's like a hydride. So hydrogen transfers. This is not a proton transfer. This is a hydride transfer. It transfers with its pair of electrons. So as H minus, not H plus. All right, this is what the transition state looks like. Again, you're not going to have to show this on the test, but I want you to see that how we get our stereochemistry here. That's what the transition state would look like. If you do this, I'm missing my second arrow here, or my first arrow I'm missing, just like that. We have a partial negative. We have a partial negative charge on boron, and we have a partial positive charge on carbon. How would you get those charges if we did it stepwise? If we did it stepwise, and we had this bond formed first, that would leave a positive charge here. And then the hydrogen is attacking the positive charge. So that's one way to think of it. Again, you don't need to draw this. But as you can see, the boron and the hydrogen have to come in on the same side. There's not room for this hydrogen to come up here and the boron to be up here. That would be geometrically impossible. So the boron and hydrogen come in on the same side. And that's how we get our stereochemistry. We call this A4 center transition state. So that's what the transition state looks like. And then here's our sin addition. And we can see that if we look at the groups that just came on, they came in on the same side. And then we do this two times more. And that's what we get. So that's the hydroboration stuff. Three things to notice, the positive charge is on the carbon that will lead to the most stable carbocation. If we were going to form a carbocation, the bulkier BH3 group is on the least substituted side. So that's a good way to remember stereochemistry here. Bulkie boron on least substituted side. So a little bit of alliteration there to help you remember. Bulkie boron on least substituted side. And boron and hydrogen are added to the same side of the molecules, so it's a sin addition. Because of the fact that the bulkier boron is on the least substituted side, means that steric factors are on the least substituted side, means that steric factors are important. Sorry, you guys are changing page in page. I've got to watch that. And because we have the partial positive charge on the carbon that leads to the most stable carbocation, we know that electronic factors are also important. So there's many things going on here. In this step two of the oxidation of the organoborane, I'm not going to show you the mechanism. Again, you can come to my office if you want to see that. But let's look at the overall stereochemical outcome, because that is very important for us. Here's the methyl. Here's the hydrogen. When we oxidize, we replace the boron with oxygen exactly where the boron is. There's no inversion. It's retention of configuration. So this boron is going to become an OH here. So important points about this is that the OH replaces boron with retention of configuration. And please skip this mechanism. I will not ask you high-divoration. I won't ask you the first part. I will not ask you the second part. I will not ask you high-divoration mechanism. You will have to learn this very important reaction for synthesis. You will use it many, many times. But skip mechanism for oxidation. I'm not going to show it to you. All right. That's a great stopping point. We will continue this on Friday.
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This is the second quarter of the organic chemistry series. Topics covered include: Fundamental concepts relating to carbon compounds with emphasis on structural theory and the nature of chemical bonding, stereochemistry, reaction mechanisms, and spectroscopic, physical, and chemical properties of the principal classes of carbon compounds. Index of Topics: 00:09 - Addition of Bromine and Chlorine to Alkenes 07:43 - How is the enantiomer formed? 13:11 - Important points about halogen reaction 22:52 - Regiochemistry in this addition 29:14 - Addition of Borane: Hydroboration/Oxidation
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10.5446/21608 (DOI)
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Good afternoon. We're going to get started. I'm going to show you the sample flash cards that I put online. You really want to start doing flash cards because we're going to be having a lot of new re- well, we've already started. There's a bunch of new reactions. There's going to be, there's a bunch in Chapter 10, a bunch in Chapter 11, very similar though, and then a bunch of new reactions in Chapter 12 that we're going to use in synthesis a lot, and then it just keeps going. It's a major reaction quarter here. So it helps you to keep them all straight in your head. Anybody have questions before we get started? Anyone? So let me show you what I'm talking about here for flash cards. So this is under the practice link. Oh, it's not on the screen. There we go. Okay, so depending on how many ways there is to do something, you might want to use a small flash card or a big flash card. Some people like to put this on the top here on one side of the flash card and then ways to do it on the bottom. Sometimes there's only one way to do it. In this case, there's more than one way to do it. And so what you want to get used to thinking about, how do I go from an alcohol to something that has the same carbon skeleton, but now the alcohol is a good leaving group? So we talked about a bunch of ways to do that in Chapter 6. So I've listed all the ways here. And then over here, notes about it. Okay, no tertiary, no tertiary. Careful with secondary alcohols, rearrangements and rassumization so that you just have that right at your fingertips and you're ready to go. Because these reactions are going to be using all year. We're actually at the halfway point now. We're halfway through O-chem. So for the rest of the year of O-chem. Here's an example here where we have a terminal alkene and you're converting it. And so you're doing anti-Marconi-Cov addition of HBR. That we'd have to do in two steps right now. In Chapter 15, we're going to learn a one step way to do that. So right now, your flash card would just have this on it. You'd have to do hydroboration, okay, which gives you anti-Marconi-Cov addition of an OH and then PBR3-Pyridine. Or you could do HBR. It's completely up to you. This is a reaction we're not going to learn until Chapter 15. So these are just some ideas for you. And then that's looking pretty complicated, huh, this one. Okay, so what we're doing is if you kind of take this apart, though, we start off with this alkene and we're forming a bromohydrin, right? So you want to be able to recognize, okay, this is a bromohydrin. I have a bromine on one carbon and adjacent to it, I have a hydroxyl and they are anti to each other. And so then your brain goes and says, okay, I know how to do that. I can do that with, I can do that. There's two ways actually to do this to give different regiochemistry. This will actually help you when you're doing your sapling, which is due tonight, right? This will help you. This flash card will help you. Just a little tip there. Okay, but let's look at this. The ethyl is trans from a methyl. The ethyl is trans from the methyl here. So we've maintained the same stereochemistry for this alkene and we just have a bromohydrin here. If you want this regiochemistry with the bromine here, the bromine would be, if you do bromine in water, it would be this regiochemistry. It's the wrong one that doesn't match that. If you want this exact regiochemistry here, where the bromine's on the most substituted side, you have to do it this way. You would have never thought of this, right? You make, you do the, you make a bromohydrin, you deprotonate, you make an epoxide and then you add HBr and you get the opposite regiochemistry. Everybody see that? Hydroxyl on the least substituted side, hydroxyl on the most substituted side. So that would be a more complicated one, but that's, it's helpful to be able to have that at your fingertips. This is something we're going to be talking about in this chapter. Alkene to ketone. This is the Marconikov product and this is the way to do it. We're also going to talk about a way to do that anti-Marconikov. So you're going to start accumulating these and you'll be really happy you did when you get into 51c because you'll have them all ready for you. And right before the test, you're just going to rifle through these cards that you've made. So good investment of your time. It's really going to help you. Questions on flash cards. Anybody? Okay, let's close that. All right, so where'd we leave off last time? We're talking about, we talked about the fact that if you have a terminal alkyne where the alkyne is at the end of a long chain or a short chain, then that proton is acidic and we were reminding ourselves of why that is acidic. And we're talking about the lone pair. Here the lone pair is in an SP orbital. Therefore, electrons are closer to the nucleus. When the electrons are closer to the nucleus, that nucleus that stabilizes the conjugate base. It's a more stable base. It's as if carbon that is SP hybridizes more electronegative. We know if a negative charge is on a more electronegative atom, it pulls it in closer and stabilizes. And that's exactly what's happening here. Therefore, the conjugate acid is more stable. Is that right? Conjugate base is more stable. I got to fix that. Conjugate base is more stable. I already wrote that. That means the, let's fix that. Goodness, that's not what I want to say at all. Therefore, if you have a more stable conjugate base, what does that say about the acid? Conjugate acid is more acidic. Conjugate acid is more acidic. All right. So, and this is just a little down here. This is just comparing what an SP, a 3SP2 and an SP orbital looks like. When we hybridize the orbitals, they take on the character of what we're using to hybridize. So, if we combine 1s and 3Ps, it's going to look more like a P than an S. As we have less Ps, we have less, it's looking less like a P and more like an S. So, when we, here we just are hybridizing an S and a P. And remember, in an S orbital, the electrons are very close to the nucleus. In a P orbital, the electrons are further from the nucleus. And so, that's all we're doing here is hybridizing these. So, this is, remember what an S orbital looks like. That's an S and this is a P. And in a P orbital, the electrons are further from the nucleus. So, when you combine them, they take on the flavor of what you've used to combine them. And so, as you can see, an SP orbitals, the orbitals are closer to the nucleus. They're shorter, squatter, wider, and looks, it just takes on the character of more S character here compared to SP3. And so, that's what we're talking about. So, because of the fact that this proton is acidic, it's not super acidic, but we can actually use reasonable bases to deprotonate terminal kinds. And so, we want to make sure we pick our bases very, very carefully here. There's two bases that we're going to use, only two to do this. And that's NH2 minus or H minus. Only bases to use. I'm going to let you pick which one you like to use in synthesis, but both of those bases will work. Let's look at NH2. This NH2 is usually done in, you'll see it in liquid ammonia. This would be the solvent. So, ammonia is normally a gas, but if you cool it down to minus 33, it's a liquid. So, we have NH2 and liquid ammonia. If you're using this as a reactant, I don't, you don't need to write the liquid ammonia. I'm just showing you the common conditions for doing this. And so, basically what we have is NH2 minus, very strong base. It's going to grab that acidic proton. We're going to push electrons onto carbon. Let's draw, let's finish this, our acid base equilibrium here. We get the conjugate base, a satellite ion, and we get ammonia. And when we're trying to find out the, which way an acid base reaction is favored, we look for conjugate acid base pairs. There's a conjugate acid base pair. The one that has the extra proton is the acid. We have another conjugate acid base pair here, NH2 minus and NH3. This is the acid. And if you do this correctly, you should have one acid on each side of the equation. You look up the pKa, for terminal all kind, pKa is about 25. That's one of the eight pKa's you need to know rounded to the nearest five. So, that's about 25. And then ammonia is also should be on there, and that has a pKa of about 35. And remember, equilibrium is favored in the way that we go from stronger acid to weaker acid. Equilibrium always favors more stable species. This species right here is more stable because it's a weaker acid. And that also means this is more stable than this. So, the both of these products are more stable. So, reaction favored to the right. And just a little check to see if we're using this as a base, we want to make sure we pretty much essentially completely deprotonated. And so, what we do is we take a difference in pKa's here. There's a difference in pKa of 10. So, at equilibrium, we have one to 10 to the 10th reactants to products. So, although in an equilibrium we're always going back and forth, we say this is essentially to completion. Alright, so that means that that's going to be a really good base for us to use. You definitely don't want to use hydroxide ion to do this deprotonation. Let's see why that won't work. We're going to do the same thing we did on the previous page. Now we're going to use hydroxide as a base. So, there's a satellite ion. Conjugate acid for hydroxide is water. We're going to look at our conjugate acid based pairs here, just like we did on the previous page. There's a conjugate acid based pair. This one has the extra proton, that's the acid. We're going to look at this conjugate acid based pair. This one has the extra proton, that's the acid. We should have one acid on each side of the equation. And then we look up to pKa's. This is pKa approximately 25, and this is pKa approximately 15. So, these are both. This makes this job really easy because these are some of the ones we need to know, rounded to the nearest 5. And so what we can see here is that the reaction is actually favored to the left. Strongly favored to the left. So, at equilibrium. The difference in pKa is about 10. We have 10 to the 10th to 1. Reactant for every product. So, hydroxide ion is only going to deprotonate one molecule out of 10 to the 10th. It's not a strong enough base to use. So, that's why you don't want to use hydroxide for this. All right, relative acidities. And this is where the relatives of acidities kick in in this chapter. So, I had my students last year, last quarter, memorize these pKa's rounded to the nearest 5, and we'll need to do that also. So, I will be testing you on this. So, we have zero. And what do these all have in common? We have oxygen with three bonds, a lone pair and a positive charge. And one of those bonds is a hydrogen. That's very acidic. Very acidic. Very acidic. Very acidic. And these range from minus 1.7 to for hydronium ion. Some of these are like minus 6, minus 5, minus 7. Something like that. So, I just want you to know they're less than zero. We're just going to have all of those in the same category. Then we have acetic acid. About 5. We have protonated amines. So, ammonium ions. Okay, those are all 10. Then we have alcohol and water. 15. We have 25 for a terminal alkyne. And then we have 35 for an amine that's not protonated. Don't get these two mixed up. These are protonated amines with a positive charge. These are not. And then we have 45 for an alkene. And then the last, of course, is the just straight alkanes with no functional groups. So, need to know that. Questions so far? Anybody? Okay. The anion derived from deprotonation is a good nucleophile. You saw this nucleophile back in Chapter 7. You might not remember it, but you saw it back in Chapter 7. And so, again, solvent is optional here. This is the solvent. And I don't want you to get thrown off by that. Liquid ammonia. And then we just deprotonate that. We make the acetylide ion. And then the acetylide ion here. Leave out the sodium. It is a spectator ion. So, we have this carbon here. Going to do backside attack. Kick off the leaving group. This is a Chapter 7 reaction. Just another example of the things you learned in 51A coming back to you. So, that's pretty much how we're going to make a terminal alkyne into an internal alkyne by doing a substitution reaction. The other thing we can do with these that you saw at the end of Chapter 9, but maybe didn't notice too much. You can also, these also can attack epoxides. It's a strong nucleophile. Strong nucleophile. Therefore, attack at least substituted site. We only get substitution on the most substituted site when it's acid catalyzed. Please don't be thrown off by this hydronium ion there. Don't think, oh wow, I see hydronium ion. This is an acid catalyzed reaction. It's not. That's a separate step entirely. We start off with this. That's going to react. And then in the second step, we protonate. So, this is going to open up. It's going to attack the epoxide on the least substituted site. We break the carbon-oxygen bond. The acid is not present in that first step, and so we don't want to include that in the first step. I did that wrong. I drew that wrong. Okay, let's start over again. Don't you wish you could do that on your page? Okay. Now, I really shouldn't bend this bond, but I don't have room here. And I'm not going to worry about that, but it should look like this. O minus. We have the R going back. There's a hydrogen that's coming forward. So, it looks like that. And then we add acid in a second step. So, now if I did that with the overhead, I would have blew all over my hands, and then I'd go like this, and I don't realize I'm doing it, and then I get blew all over my face and all that. So, this is better from that perspective anyway. All right. So, one thing we want to be careful about when we're using a satellite ion. A satellite ion is the conjugate base of a terminal alkyne. It's a great nucleophile, but it's also a very strong base, very, very strong. So, this will work with primary or methyl alkyl halides or tosylates. It will not work with secondary. Reaction with secondary alkyl halides will give E2 rather than SN2. Okay, so let's see what this looks like. Let's put some hydrogens on this carbon here. So, it's how exactly it's going to happen. This guy here, rather than doing substitution, it's such a strong base. It wants to act as a base. It's going to, we're going to eliminate a beta hydrogen, kick off bromine. So, major product is E2. Got to be careful. It's a really, really strong base. PKA is 25 of its conjugate acid. So, that means it's a really strong base. So, substitution doesn't really stand a chance there. All right, let's talk about preparation of alkynes. This is a review reaction. When did you learn this? How to prepare alkynes? Like just now, right? Just chapter 8. Be any of this quarter, chapter 8. So, what we do is we have a viscinal or a geminal dihalide, two equivalents of NaNH2, and we get our alkyne. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this reaction now that I didn't tell you at the end of chapter 8. Let's just go through this though. Let's go through the mechanism, even though I showed this to you already. We're going to eliminate a hydrogen that is anti to the bromine, one of the bromines here. And then we got one more bromine to eliminate. So, that first elimination goes relatively easily. The second elimination is harder to do because we're breaking an sp2 carbon hydrogen bond. That's going to require more energy. That is a stronger bond. So, this is really where we need the very strong base here. So, don't try to do this with hydroxide. I can tell you firsthand that it doesn't work. We used to, in my class, when I inherited the honors and the majors, Okam lab, there was an experiment where we had a viscinal di bromide and we used solid sodium hydroxide. We added the viscinal dihalide and we heated it up to 250 degrees. So, not very favorable and that's why you have to heat it up so high. And honestly, it turned to tar. It did not work at all. So, you want to use a stronger base so that the reaction can happen at reasonable temperatures and it just didn't. We got maybe 1% of the product. So, it's just not a very good reaction. Ok, so there's our alkyne. Careful, you are making a terminal alkyne. You need three equivalents. So, this is the new thing that I didn't tell you before. Why? As soon as the terminal alkyne is formed, it will be deprotonated by the strongly basic NH2 minus acid-base reactions are faster than E2 reactions. So, let me show you what I mean here. This is super fast. If you don't use three equivalents, you will run out of base and we will get an incomplete conversion. So, we are going to count NH2 minus molecules. We are going to do this mechanism one more time. We had so much fun doing it the last time. We are going to do this one more time. And then we are going to count NH2. So, we have already done these two steps. Let's do them again. The only difference here is that this one, we have two hydrogens on the carbon on the right. So, we are going to be making a terminal alkyne, where the alkyne is at the end of the chain. Ok, so let's do that one more time. Second elimination. Notice I am throwing lone pairs on that leaving group. We are going to do that. Let's see what we get now. Terminal alkyne in the presence of NH2 minus. That is an acidic proton, right? So, you can't stop this next step from happening. As soon as that terminal alkyne is formed, it is going to be deprotonated by NH2. We just proved that that reaction is very, very, very highly favorable. And acid-based reactions are very fast. So, that is what you get when you are done with the reaction. And so, in a second step, you need to do a second step. You need to add water or acid. And we will sometimes call this, when we do this, acidic workup. That is common terminology. So, that means we have to do acid in a second step in order to get our terminal alkyne. So, we are going to count our NH2's. There is number one. There is number two. There is number three. So, I get a lot of students who say, and I know some of you are thinking this, well, why can't I just stop right here? Then I wouldn't have to have a second step of acid. The reason you can't stop right there is because this is so fast. This reaction is so fast. The only way that you could do this reaction and be able to stop here, and some of you, I know some of you think this is the way it happens because it happens so, sometimes reactions happen so fast. We think that every molecule is reacting simultaneously. But remember, when we do reactions, the molecules have to collide. They have to collide in the right orientation and they have to collide with enough energy to react. So, not all the molecules are going to react simultaneously. So, the only way that we could stop right here is if we lined up all these molecules and said, okay, on your mark, it said go. Do step one. Then they stop and wait for you. Then you say, okay, now do step two. Then there would be none of this left. Then, so this step wouldn't happen if you just used two equivalents. We know that molecules don't react that way. So, some of this is going to be formed before another molecule of this even gets eliminated until we do an elimination. So, we have to do excess acid. So, there is a sapling problem that, there's a sapling problem. I'm going to be opening up this a sapling assignment today. There's a sapling problem that deals with that. So, make sure you keep track of the number of NH2 minus molecules that you have. Questions? Anybody on this? It's too bad we can't tell the molecules what to do like that. That would make, the grad students, any would be a lot happier. Every reaction would work like it was supposed to. All right. So, if you're making a terminal alkyne, you must add a final protonation step. Viscinal dihalytes are made from alkenes and bromine, and the conversion of an alkene to an alkyne therefore involves two steps or if it's terminal three steps. So, this is what it looks like. Step one, Br2. That's chapter 10. Step two, NaNH2. Two equivalents. That's chapter nine. Or chapter eight. That's chapter eight. If it's a terminal alkyne, you need three steps. Step one, bromine. Step two, three equivalents of NaNH2. Step three, acid. H3O plus or water. I would take water also. Okay. So, that's how we make an alkyne from an alkyne. Questions? Anybody? All right. So, let's talk about electrophilic addition. Reactions of alkynes. And here's the part of this chapter where it's going to be really easy for you if you know chapter 10 because it's the same reactions. It's doing the same exact thing. There's a little bit different but not very much. Okay. So, let's do HBr first. If we have an alkyne and we add one equivalent of HBr, that means we add one bromine, HBr molecule, across the alkene and we get one bromine. If we add a second equivalent of HBr, we get two bromines. So, we get addition of two molecules of HBr across the double bond. Okay. Here's the mechanism. Again, if you know HBr, this has a slight difference to it but if you know HBr mechanism, this is going to be easy for you. So, possible mechanism for midterm two. Markovic addition, right? Hydrogen goes on the least substituted side. Carbocadiene goes on the most substituted side. Markovic addition. This is a vinyl cation. We'll talk about stability of a vinyl cation in just a minute here. Bromide ion comes in and attacks the carbocation. A vinyl cation or you can call it a vinyl carbocation. So, the positive charge is on the carbon that's part of an SP, it's an SP2 carbon that's part of a carbon-carbon double bond. And then we're going to add again. This is our second equivalent. So, this reaction, we're in charge. We can dictate how much HBr we want to add. Unlike the previous one where we really didn't control it. All right. And it turns out that the second addition is also Markovic addition. So, I'm going to put the positive charge on the more substituted carbon. Hydrogen's going on the least substituted carbon. All right. It might not be obvious why that's a more stable carbocation because we have a bromine that's electron withdrawing. Just think about this. We have two things going on here. We have an inductive effect. Bromine's electron withdrawing that's going to pull electron density away making that carbon more or less positive. More positive. More positive means less stable. But we have that electron withdrawing effect, that inductive effect. But we also have lone pairs of bromine we can kick in and make a double bond there to form a resonance stabilized carbocation. And that's actually the more important thing here. So, we can push electrons in here and we can draw a resonance structure where carbon bromine bond. Bromine has a positive charge. I'm not very happy about that. But the more important thing is that in the second resonance structure all atoms have an octet and we have an extra covalent bond. So, that's really important here. That's more important than where the positive charge is. So, the two key things here are we have an inductive effect. Bromine is an electron withdrawing. This destabilizes this. Destabilizes the carbocation. But it can stabilize by resonance. And when we have opposing things happening with an inductive effect and resonance, it expects that resonance affects 99% of the time or more important. Okay, so, but it can stabilize by resonance. So, let's write that down. What I just said is when these two things conflict, so when an inductive and resonance affects conflict, resonance usually wins. Alright, and in the last step, let's draw the last step here. I'm going to draw, I'm going to redraw this carbocation because otherwise if I don't redraw that the arrows are going to get confusing. So, I'm going to redraw this. What happens in the last step is exactly what we would expect. The bromine comes in and attacks the carbocation. So this is the last step. So, no stereochemistry to worry about here. We don't have any stereocenters. So I'm not going to draw, I'm not going to worry about it. Carbon on the left is bonded to two bromines. Carbon on the right is bonded to three hydrogen. So we definitely don't have anything that we have to worry about with respect to stereochemistry here. Questions on that mechanism, anybody? Some of you might have noticed. Well, what do we know about stability of a vinyl carbocation? If you've looked at the carbocation stability handout, you're a little bit worried about this. You know, we said we can't make a primary and a vinyl cation is less stable than a primary. So there is some doubt about whether a vinyl cation is actually formed in this reaction and there's three reasons why. Number one, vinyl cations are very unstable. Number two, trans products usually predominate. Where we would get the trans product, there's no trans product in the final product, but if we did one equivalent, we tend to get trans here. So if this was an R group here, we would get this trans. So that's something that's kind of suggesting that it's not really a carbocation. Because if it was a carbocation, we'd get cis and trans products. And if you measure the rate law, and the rate law gives us ideas about how a reaction is actually taking place, more than one halogen appears in the rate law. Okay, so this is a mechanism where the true mechanism, I'm not giving you the true mechanism here. Okay, so the true mechanism is a lot more complicated than this. This is the mechanism we're going to learn, but the reality is that the true mechanism is more complex. True mechanism is more complex. So, you can imagine if I asked you to come up with a mechanism where it has more than one halogen in the rate law, you might have trouble doing that. So that tells you it's something that's super complicated. And so this is just to remind you about carbocation stability here. We have tertiary here. We have secondary. This is secondary vinylic. And secondary vinylic is approximately the same as primary. These guys are about the same. But here is a primary vinylic where the carbocation is only bonded to one other carbon. And that's about the same as methyl. So these guys are about the same. So we really have no business drawing vinyl cations in a mechanism, do we? We're just going to kind of overlook that. Alright, and we're going to do, we liked that so much we're going to do it again on the next page. So we're just going to kind of think, and what it really is, is some sort of a bridging species. Bridging hydrogen species. I'm not going to go into it, but there is an explanation for it. It's just too complicated for this class. Alright, let's talk about addition of water to alkynes. Hydration. I don't do this very often. I do this twice the whole entire year, where I tell you something will absolutely be on the test. And I will tell you this mechanism will be on the test. Okay? Don't do that very often. It's an important mechanism. Why do I have this guaranteed on the test? Because I really like this mechanism. No, it's because it's going to very much help you to prepare you for 51C. And my job is to release you into 51C and have you do well. Because you have a good strong foundation. So that's my job. So what we're going to do here is we're going to form a ketone. This was one of the ones that was on the sample flashcards that I showed you. But we definitely want to somehow, and I want to do bright colors, but it's not going to show up. Mechanism will be on test. Whoops, what did I just do? What did I just do? There we go. Okay, mechanism will be on test. So let's go through the mechanism. Let's go through the mechanism and let's add up how many points this will be on the first test. And then since everybody knows it will be on there, there will be nobody with a score less than this, okay? I wish. Okay. I wish. One of these days. So yeah, you know, certain things just don't happen. Like, I've been teaching for 20 years. No one ever has gotten a zero on my exam except for one time last year. Somebody got a zero. You know what I mean? And so it just never happens. So these things can happen. They're just not, they're very uncommon. So definitely, if it's a multiple choice, don't ever leave it empty, right? Because you can probably certainly guess an answer. All right. Does the first step look familiar to you? It's just like an alkene, protonating an alkene. All right. We're going to make a vinyl cation again. And I have something that's symmetrical so it doesn't really matter which side I put the cation on. I'm going to put the hydrogen on one side and I'm going to put the cation on the other. So, so far it's looking just exactly like the mechanism we just did. By the way, my daughter ended up becoming an English major, not a chemistry major, so. Okay. So, water's going to attack the carbocation. I bet you could have even predicted that, right? So far it's looking. And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to do, I'm going to go back and I'm going to do reversible arrows here. Now I get a lot of questions on, oh, do I have to remember to do reversible arrows on a test and I say no. The only thing I grade when I'm grading a mechanism is the curvy arrows, not the reversible arrows. But I'm just drawing them here to show you that each of these steps is reversible. All right. So what we did was we put the positive charge on them, well, it doesn't matter here. This is we have, it doesn't really matter where side that goes on. Okay. And so then we have, what do we have? So, so far this is looking just like what happens with an alkene. So what do we need to do next? Do we need to protonate that oxygen, right? So let's deprotonate oxygen. Okay. We're going to do it, now we're going to protonate one more time. Okay, so just like we did with the HBr, we're going to protonate one more time. So I'm going to put hydronium ion over here. By the way, everybody see why I'm using hydronium ion? It makes it a little easier, number one. And number two, if we take H2SO4 catalytic and we put it into water, it's going to completely dissociate anyway. So it's a little easier to draw hydronium ion then to draw sulfuric acid. But if you like to draw out sulfuric acid, you certainly can and you would get full credit here. So we're going to do this one more time. Protonate one more time. And just like with the HBr, we are going to put the hydrogen on the same carbon that we put the first hydrogen. So we're going to have the carbocation. Oh, and I put that in the wrong spot. Let me put that, fix that. We have an OH here. And I'm going to put the carbocation on that same carbon. So just like we did with the HBr, so some part of these are really similar. And we have the same situation here where we have an inductive effect. This hydroxyl pulls electrons away from the carbocation and destabilizing it. But by resonance, we can kick electrons in and stabilize it. And that's going to be the more important effect. And so I'm going to draw the resonance structure here. And then you're going to see how very close we are to drawing the product once we draw this resonance structure. So on the test, when I ask you this question, I also want you to draw the resonance structure. I'm just going to do CH2, CH3, because that's what this is for right here. Make that a little easier. Resonance stabilized carbocation. So we have on the oxygen, we have a lone pair, and we have a positive charge. And then, everybody see we're one step away. If we just deprotonate the second resonance structure that we draw, we will have our product. So these electrons are going to come in. We're going to break the oxygen-hydrogen bond, and we're going to form our product. So it looks like that. That is time. We're going to stop right there, and we will finish this next time. It's not done yet.
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This is the second quarter of the organic chemistry series. Topics covered include: Fundamental concepts relating to carbon compounds with emphasis on structural theory and the nature of chemical bonding, stereochemistry, reaction mechanisms, and spectroscopic, physical, and chemical properties of the principal classes of carbon compounds. Index of Topics: 01:15 - Sample Flashcards 05:33 - Acidity and s Character 14:59 - Relative Acidities 16:32 - Some Reactions after Deprotonation 21:50 - Preparation of Alkynes 30:54 - Addition of Hydrogen Halides to Alkynes 41:59 - Addition of Water to Alkynes: Hydration
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