so that's really been my focus. it's not trying to prohibit technology. i think that's impossible to do and probably not smart in the long run because a lot of these technologies have other applications. and there are some people that don't mind this technology in their lives, and that's fine by me. >> host: now, with regard to cars, insurance companies are getting in on this act of monitoring, aren't they? >> guest: yes, they are. and i understand that. i mean, on some levels they would have some sort of an obligation from their perspective to determine who's a good driver, who's a bad driver, who's a safe driver. they have to set rates, and i understand their business needs for wanting that information. and if the information's available, i really couldn't even plame them for doing it. so, therefore, for me it should be in my control as to what information they can get from me. >> host: um, representative capuano, have you -- what kind of response have you gotten from your colleagues on capitol hill? >> guest: well, the we are watching you has garnered some support lately only because moe people look at it the exact same way i did, the first thing you

read you have to figure it's a joke and where's the punchline, and then you figure, well, it's science fiction, it's a million miles away, and that's why on the releases i put out to my colleagues here in the congress i've actually attached copies of the patent itself not for any reason other than to show them this is real. i didn't make this up, i didn't make up these quotes or these examples. this is directly out of an official patent filed by a major international corporation. so i've gotten some fair response on this. the problem is a lot of this information even to members of congress, they just don't know it. i think you could walk down the street today and tap the shoulders of a hundred people on any street in america, and my guess is 95-99% of them don't know that their car probably has one of these black boxes in it right now or what that information is or how it could be used against them. therefore, until people know it, they really can't have an honest discussion about it and exactly what this society wants. >> host: what about when it comes to cell phones or tablets and the tracking? have you looked at those issues as well?

>> guest: only tangentially. there are a lot of these things people already know. most people know when you turn that gps device on or even if you don't that you probably can be tracked on a cell phone. but i do think that the whole panoply of invasions of privacy really are subject, long overdue for an honest discussion. and my hope is that these bills will trigger that to have these discussions not just limited to this technology because, honestly, once i file these bills, i've actually become more aware of devices out there that i didn't know about. so i think as america looks at these bills my hope is that they wonder what is we as americans want to do about sharing our information with the government or sharing information with companies? and i think that that discussion will be a good one, in my opinion. it's overdue, but we might even come to a conclusion that i disagree with, but at least it'll be with thoughtful and one that people have participated in. right now the silence is deaf ping. >> host: do you have bipartisan sponsors and what about a senate

sponsor? >> guest: we have some bipartisan sponsors, and i just had two people on the floor of the house today before i came here. they said i heard about this bill, could you get me on this bill. so, again, it's information. we do have some bipartisan support. i don't know that we have bicameral support yet, but i think it's more a lack of information than anything else. >> host: did you introduce these prior to the revelations about the nsa? >> guest: i just found out about this late last year, the black box bill we've introconstitutioned, i think, for the last three or four years, something like that. >> host: we've been talking with representative mike be l capuano, a democrat of massachusetts. he sits on the financial services, transportation and infrastructure and ethics committees in the congress. thank you for your time, sir. >> guest: thank you very much. >> c-span be, created by america's cable companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television

provider. >> coming up, remarks by the ceo of the worldwide research and development company sri international on the future of innovation. then dick costolo, the ceo of twitter, on his company's policy concerning national security data requests. and later, a house subcommittee explores the use of social media during emergencies. >> now, a discussion with the president and ceo of sri international, a worldwide research and development company located in silicon valley. he's joined by the head of the company's information and computing science division. this forum was hosted earlier this year by the computer history museum in mountain view, california. it's about an hour and ten minutes. [applause]

>> good evening. thank you for coming. you know, this series is part, particularly for me, about understanding the ecosystem of silicon valley, and there are lots of myths that are true and some not so true about silicon valley. but one of the myths is that innovation comes from college dropouts in garages. [laughter] and i think if you think about it for just a little bit, i mean, where would home brew have been without park and sale and sri, and where would facebook and google have been without darpa or then arpa and sri? you know, i think you can see there's a common theme emerging here. you know, the reality is that fundamental innovation often comes from corporate research labs and, you know, gasp, it

even is funded by the government occasionally. in fact, frequently. so we've been trying to or the of explore that subterranean ecosystem. we're going to focus on sri tonight, and we're going to start more focused on sort of the computing part of sri, and then we'll incite curt carlson up, and we'll expand it to talk about sort of the full breadth of sri which is really quite stunning. and we're also going to, i think, mostly look forward today, but with bill mark i sort of wanted to get a hitting sense of the trajectory of your career. and so backwards initially. and, you know, you started at mit, and i'd sort of like to know which generation as a computer scientist. there are many generations of computing at sri. one was profiled by steven levy in hackers. where were you in that sort of evolution? >> well, i started at mit when computer science was actually still a pretty new discipline.

just to place it in terms of ai, terry -- [inaudible] is finishing up his thesis. he was the senior graduate student god, and patrick win son was finishing up -- winston was finishing up his thesis. i learned how to program a pdp-10, a half decent pdp-10 assembly language programmer in case anybody needs that. [laughter] >> and so were you around when the hackers were at the ai lab, and were you focused on a ai a lot? >> i was definitely intrigued by ai. i was actually in project mac as it was then called, spent a lot of time in the ai lab and, yes, i knew some of the hackers. >> and so which part in terms of your thesis or the things you worked on, what were you working on? >> i eventually ended up doing work in knowledge presentation. and i got interested in how

people with expert knowledge were able to map problems that they saw into their expertise. so i had this idea of reformulation, and that's what my thesis was about. >> and then did you go, did you go on into ai as a career, and did you go through the ai winter? [laughter] you actually have this very diverse background. was ai the first -- >> yes. it was a little more complicated than that. so i went to work for general motors research laboratories, and i was actually doing natural language interaction with databases, which they were very interested in at the time. and then i went on to isi in southern california which is part of the, part of usc. it's a nonprofit research lab a story. laboratory. and worked there also in ai acknowledgment presentation. >> i see. >> then i went off to start a company. >> are an ai company? >> um, sort of. certainly, something that was

trying to bring knowledge-based systems, i guess you'd call it ai, to the world of manufacturing. of all things. there are. >> and was that a case of being too early? >> i like to think so. it certainly was a failure. [laughter] so i'm absolutely sure it was a brilliant idea that was too early. >> yeah. [laughter] so did you come from a generation at mit that was sort of significantly prior to personal computing, what did you think about personal computing when it sort of showed up on the scene in the mid '70s in. >> so when i first came to mit, it was all about timesharing, and that's what i thought computing was. and i certainly saw personal computing coming. everybody did. starting off with some very funky machines, some of which are here in this building. so it was actually pretty hard to take seriously at the beginning. i didn't take it all that seriously. they weren't very good machines for ai at that time.

but that swiftie changed. >> yeah. and -- swiftly changed. >> yeah. and be so going a little farther back than that, you grew up in the center of the country, how did you get to mit? >> ah. well, i grew up in the midwest. i'm actually from minnesota. and i got very interested in science at a very early age. i can't remember not being interested in science. i used to read all kinds of science books. but i didn't, i certainly didn't always want to be a computer scientist. in high school i went through a brief period of wanting to be a journalist, of all things. [laughter] >> you got over that quickly, i see. >> i did. [laughter] actually, i was assigned to interview rock stars who came to cincinnati. and believe it or not, that included jimmy hendrix and jefferson airplane. i talked to those people. >> so who was your favorite interview? >> jimi hendrix. wonderful.

very quiet, and my opportunity to talk to him was right before the show. and he was surrounded by people trying to give him guitars to play. as well as lots of girls who wanted to say hi. [laughter] but he was the consummate professional. he was just totally focused on those guitars, how well they were working and so forth. anyway, that was very cool. but i discovered that i was a horrible journalist. >> did that place you after sputnik? the sputnik stuff happened? i'm just wondering if that shaped your interest in science at all. >> no, i don't think that shaped my interest in science. i do remember getting very engaged in isaac saimo -- asimov's robot stories, and i'm not a big science fiction fan. but i remember that vividly because i thought it was so cool to think about the implications in those three laws. and i'm sure a lot of these, a lot of you have read these stories. a number of them are about

understanding, people trying to understand why the robots were behaving the way they were. and they had to figure this out, and it was debugging as we would consider it now. but it really got me thinking about the nature of intelligence which is really what ai is all about. so that got me interested. >> you wouldn't a big science fiction fan, but did you stumble across the foundation trillion sway? >> -- trilogy? >> yes. >> every big data person i've run into was deeply influenced, it had the same effect. so let's skip forward -- >> thank you. >> will [laughter] so in running a cs department, basically, at sri how would you send apart from what goes on at stanford or microsoft apart, for example? what's different about your work? >> sure. well, some things are similar, let me just start there for a

second. so i think one of the things that's incredibly important about sri is that there's this culture of mindset of doing big things, changing the world. and you saw some of those in the earlier presentation. and people come to sri certainly in the computer science area to add another slide to that list. and that really motivates people. >> and culturally, are you able to do that in this sort of we have this classic silicon valley hothouse period. just been stories recently about groups of people leaving stanford at once. do you have a sort of management problem, of people being cherry picked by -- >> oh, we have competitors, some of whom are sitting here. [laughter] but we don't, we don't have wholesale groups leaving, and that's in part because -- getting to your question -- we have what i think is a unique

mix. because we really do research, we do real research, and because a lot of it is government funding, funded, that means that we work closely with university researchers. so this is this community of -- there's this community of what i think of as some of the hottest researchers in the country in computer science. plus, um, we do stuff in the commercial world. and particular we start companies which is very exciting to people. and that's a big attracter for us. >> and is that something that's actually spun up under curt? i mean, is that a culture that's evolved over the last decade, two decades? >> well, definitely yes. i would say that when i came to sri, one of the things that brought me to sri was the very beginnings of that, this strategy of having the research be also used to create things in the commercial world. curt came about one year after i came, and that -- then it really

took off. and in particular the idea of spin-off companies took off. >> with yeah. before we leave your past entirely, you also spent time in the semiconductor industry. >> i did. >> with i didn't want get a chance to ask you about this, but were you there as an architect? this was at national? >> right. i was at national semiconductor, and i ran the architecture lab. i wasn't the architect, but there were certainly architects working there. and the whole idea was this was the emergence of systems on chip, and the systems were getting very complex, and the hardware and software had to be delivered in the same kind of bundle. that what's ooh what lab was -- that's what that lab was all ant. >> was that during the can risk era? >> after the risk era. during the risk era. >> so do we have to debunk a myth here about siri? do you know the story of how siri came to be named? >> yes, i do. [laughter] the, so at sri when we do

spin-offs -- so, first of all, like you were saying before, like a lot of these things, siri's decades in the making, right? but when we see a disruptive opportunity, we bring in an entrepreneur from the outside. in the case of siri, the entrepreneur is of norwegian heritage. and be he chose the name siri which is, i gather, not an uncommon but not a common norwegian woman's name. okay? that's siri, okay? [laughter] and also because he could get the domain name. >> okay. so sri was -- [laughter] four-letter domain name, that's still a pretty good deal. >> yeah. >> that's impressive. so, you know, i've been around long enough that i can actually remember being given a voice recognition demonstration by gary hendricks of sri probably '81, '82?

>> probably right. >> i think it was called the admiral's -- well, i can't remember what it was called, but basically he was able to say left and right and controlling the battleship. >> did it work okay? >> the demo worked, but it was sparse. [laughter] for me, siri is such a tour de force because you can clearly see we've made such extraordinary progress over -- >> it's been amazing. so there's progress in, certainly, the speech area where right now automatic speech recognition certainly if you're on a smartphone works very well for a lot of people which is big news. but in addition to that, the ai, the reasoning part of siri made tremendous progress. >> yeah. so one of the things you said in a note to to me is i see siri aa step in one-person interaction. i'm intrigued.

give me a sense of what one-person interaction -- >> well, almost everything that people think about in terms of human/computer interaction is about one person talking to a computer, a computational device, okay in and that's extremely important. that's what siri is, and we're working right now on generations after siri and so forth. but still, thinking in terms of one person talking to a device. but as we go into or as we go more into the era of the ubiquitous computing, then you have to think about space. and when you're in a space, a computational space, there's -- if there's another person in that space, in most circumstances there's going to be interaction between the people, the people will talk to each other. when people occupy the same space, they tend to talk to each other. ask they will talk to the device -- and they will talk to the devices in the area. >> so that seems to touch a it

little bit on the idea that i knew of as ubiquitous computing, but it's not the same thing? would you differentiate it? >> well, i think it's looking at the future of ubiquitous computing. when i think of ubiquitous computing, i think of the idea of smart environments. and that's absolutely true, it's coming. your car is one. but there hasn't been enough focus, in my opinion, on what happens when people occupy those spaces. because they're going to talk to each other. and it's also fascinating because we've worked are hard to make computation independent of space. so computation actually doesn't care where you are. almost all the time. but people think completely differently. we act very differently in different spaces, right? you act differently in your living room than you do in your office. and i think a world is coming in which the computation in that space has a sense of the space and what people will be doing

and how to help them. >> and within that framework, you've also broached this notion of a virtual personal assistant. >> right. >> is that like an application within an intelligent space? is that what you -- >> well, virtual personal assistant transcends both one person talking to a computational device and many people talking to a computational device. and we're actually working on pote of those. >> you just spun out another company that hasn't got quite as much attention, a company called tempo that does intelligence countering which you can get on your iphone now. does tempo use a different set of ai technologies? what differentiates it from the stuff we see in siri or underneath siri? >> tempo which, by the way, got a huge amount of attention, they completely underestimated the demand that they would have and we're swamped with -- but they're through it now so, please, use tempo -- [laughter] so siri, the idea of siri is to have a conversational interface.

and and the original siri spin-off, the idea of that was to have people be able to get things done through consideration. and when you think about it, that's how we do a lot of things. we get things done through conversation by talking to other people. in this case we're talking to a device. then the vpa concept, virtual personal assistant, concept that you mentioned before has actually taken that further to start having even more in-depth conversations about doing complex tasks like banking or education, that kind of thing. tempo is using a different paradigm. so instead of the focus being a conversation, the focus is the calendar. and the great insight was that when people put meetings on calendars, they're expressing an intent. when you say something in a conversation, you're expressing an intent. when you put something on the calendar, you're also expressing an intent. and we can do reasoning, ai,

based on that intent. >> and, i mean, so if you look at sort of the big threads in ai research these days, there is this world now that seems to have taken over everything, but you came out of an expert system world. >> yeah. >> the tempo technology, does it sort of, does can it pull on some of those expert system threads? >> it does both. so the cool stuff, i think, is happening at the merger of those two things. so there's some statistical modeling that goes on, and there's also some reasoning, logic-type reasoning that goes on. so it will if you set a meeting, it will automatically, if you let it, find things in your e-mail, pull out your e-mails that are relevant to that meeting, find documents that are relevant to the meeting. it'll look up the attendees and linkedin, that kind of thing, look up the location for you, give you a map. and they have lots more ideas. >> and do you think these interfaces are sort of the stuff

that's in tempo and in siri and that came out of this project that was funded by darpa, do you think it's powerful enough to, basically, you know, i keep wondering when the computer is going to disappear entirely and when these things are actually first steps toward i don't know if it's star trek computing or whatever it is, but the disappearance of computing in terms of interface, how quickly? >> i do think that it will, and i do think that's relevant that media and space is the kind of thing i was talking about before where right now, i mean, the generation that's growing up when they're talking to siri, they don't think of that as a computer, i don't think. they're not aware of the computation going on. and now more and more people in their car have conversational interfaces. that doesn't seem like a computer to them. >> so in the graphics world, there's this long-term, the longtime term called the uncandy valley about this world where

you get to this sort of surreal period before you cross over and it's natural. >> right. >> could you see an uncanny valley interacting with virtual personal assistants? >> yes. and i think that, um, in fact, people are too ready to cross over that valley. because we bring so much to a conversation. we're so willing to read in to what's going on on the other side that we're going to expect -- we already see this, by the way. we think of the thing as being more human and more capable than it actually is. >> which goes back to wisen balm be, basically, in some sense. >> oh, yes. so wisenbaum, i think it was 1962, so a really long time ago, and very by modern standards primitive technology, but people were bringing so much to that conversation that they thought these little things they were getting back were intelligent. >> be so social and economic consequences, how profound? >> oh, profound.

i think the other, the thing that gives me hope -- [laughter] is people are very smart and adaptive, and i think they're going to get used to this, this world of conversational interfaces. and they will know where to put it in their conceptual framework. i think we're seeing that with siri right now. >> yeah. and then sort of the freak to mommics aspect of this. i mean, i'm probably derelict for not having reported this, but i have seen -- let's t say there was this vast outsourcing of call centers to, you know, india and to the philippines, and i believe that those jobs have already come home in significant numbers to run this software and data centers. that, you know, you could measure that although the companies are not cooperative in terms of the numbers. so where does that, where does that end? >> i certainly don't know where it ends. i've also heard about that trend. i think it will continue. and, um, i think this is a very

natural thing where technology causes disruptions, and then people adapt to them. >> yeah. so talk just a little bit about the roots of calo. you know, tony tether has been criticized so much by particularly academic community, but wasn't he -- to what extent was he key in caho and it was a favorite project of his? >> are well, tony was absolutely critical. >> tony tether was one of the heads of darpa for many years actually. >> yes. >> and during that period there was a lot of conflict with the academic community. he pushed calo? >> yes. so calo was an idea that was created by ron brockman and zack lemnios who were part of the information technology office as it was then. and tony absolutely embraced this project. he pushed it to be more and more researchy, really wanted to push the edge. absolutely wanted to focus on learning. you mentioned the academic

community. sri ran that program. i was one of the principal investigators. if ray is somewhere out here, he was the other one. we had 20-plus university subcontractors working on this project. so tony was critical to it. >> so i see we're, i want to, i want to bring curt up soon, but let me take one more sort of step into the ai world. you know, i noticed when i was reporting on my last book that there were sort of two labs in the mid '60s on either side of stanford university. there was sri, doug engelbart, sale, john mccarthy. and if you think about what they were doing, at that point the john mccarthy project was to replace the human being, the human brain and the human itself, and they thought it would take about a decade. [laughter] no, it was in the first proposals, 1975. which brings us to paul saf foes

never make a clear view for a sort short distance. and on the other side, doug engelbart was trying to augment human intelligence. i know there's a spectrum, but there's also been this tension all the way through, and sort of as a designer how do you think about where to put the human in, where to take the human out now that you can do it in the so many places? >> well, so for me as soon as you adopt the notion that one of the tools in the engelbartian sent, -- sense, one of the tools that can augment the human intellect is something that's also intelligent, okay? then those two things come together immediately. >> yeah. >> so that's -- in the normal human world, forget at computation for a moment, that's how we work. we work in teams. we work with other people. we work with assistants, okay? they augment us. so to me, that's the merging of those ideas. >> will it be with minimal or more disruption?

economic or other side? >> well, again, i think it will -- i personally think that it will be a smooth transition because, as i told you, i think people are very adaptive to the this kind of stuff. so the technology will come on, it'll get better and better, and people will adapt to it. >> okay. curt carlson, this is a good transition point. why don't you come on up. [applause] so curt has run, you're the, you're an evangelist, but you're also the ceo of -- [laughter] since 1998. >> with yeah. >> and you're a physicist by training, and you were deeply involved in the development of hd-tv standard. and your expertise is in sort of the physics of perception in a sense? >> um, i ran a perception group. i ran a computer vision group. i ran the hi-definition television book, program when i was at rca. and that was bought by ge.

and i still ran those programs. i was actually running a program called heights before there was an internet. it was called home entertainment information transactional services. heits. >> where did heits go? [laughter] >> heits went nowhere. we were way too early. and i add citicorp as my partners on a big them, but it was way, way too early. >> okay. >> so i had some interesting experiences at rca. >> i sort of telegraphed what my first question was going to be because i started doing homework on what is sri, and i focused pretty narrowly, it turns out. you just go to their web site, and here's this organization that, you know, does software, they do educational research, they do cs research, you're into be building satellites, they return radio telescopes, biotech and you're a nonprofit. so my first question is, what's

sri? what are you? [laughter] >> well, bill was saying, it's a collection of people, first and foremost, who really want to make a big, positive contribution to society. it's an organization that's part of the culture, obviously, of silicon valley, but it's, it really is a group of people who literally want to change the world for the better. and we talk all the time at sri about what we call important problems as opposed to ones that are just interesting. important not just interesting. and it turns out that's also a good business model, because many of the folks in this room, i'm sure, feel this. what motivates people is having a chance to work on a big, important problem. that attracts the best people. you can also raise money if it's a big, important problem. you also have the time to do that. and you can also have the best partners. everything we do, one of the

things that's a little bit different about us, i think everything we do is with great partners. so when bill said we put the calo team with 20 universities, it was the a-team, you know? it was the best people from cmu and stanford and mit. and we're able to form these teams that go after these big with, hard problems. and, with a very high probability of being successful with them. >> so in terms of scale, is your revenue around 600 million? >> yeah. >> is that a ballpark? >> yeah. >> and so give me a sense, i mean, so let me think about you compared to miter and rand, for example. would you be very different than they are, or are there similarities that -- >> well, so, you know, we all kind of do research. i think that, again, what makes us different is maybe a couple things, one of which is we really do after these big, hard,

important problems x. that's part of the culture of the place. we do team with the best people in the world. that's part of the culture. that's just the way we think about it. we have a formal innovation process that we teach everybody at sri. everybody who comes through the door, we teach them. bill was very modest about forming siri, but that was years of work. bill and his colleague played the key role, and be we actually have a process in place to incubate major companies like that. very few companies take innovation as seriously as we do. we have a formalized process, as i said, that we teach everybody. and the incubation processes we have, some of our venture partners are in the room tonight. we work with the best venture capitalists in silicon valley, and you put all those pieces together, and you begin to get a pretty unique place. >> and the relationship to the venture community, it's relatively new, is that true?

>> well, it's been deepened over, as bill said, other the last 14 years, and we've cultivated a group of venture capitalists. we've done four companies with gary more -- morgan that woulder, four with mayfield, you know, it's -- we've made friends, and we keep on going back to -- [laughter] we like them, they like us. we keep on doing things. >> and are you about 80% government -- >> yeah, about 80%be government. the government pays for the research, basically, the fundamental research. and then we commercialize it either by forming a partnership with a company, or we do a license, or in the case of many of bill's companies, he actually incubates them in our formal process where we're constantly putting together about a dozen companies at one time and maybe two or three of them will spin out every year. >> which but given that 80% from the government, what's the sequester mean to you? how serious is the sequester in

terms of -- >> so far it hasn't been terrible. it's, obviously, not good. for anybody in the room, that kind of confusion in washington is not a very helpful thing. our commercialization work seems to be going along fine, and many of our groups have had very little impact from it. some others a little bit more. but we'll be fine. we're, the world's a big place, and, you know, even though we're 600 million on the scale of research and innovation worldwide, we're still pretty small. >> be -- and so the relationship with the venture community is one part of your connection to the ecosystem. do you have a sort of larger -- i mean, where does sri fit into silicon valley writ large? >> >> well, that's a good question. we're here tonight. [laughter] we, we show up all over the place. we show up at the churchill club. we obviously have many friends

here. we work with different companies in the valley and different things. as you said, we're often -- or maybe john said it -- that people often don't know what we do because we're kind of the partner behind the commercial entity. so, you know, we license the computer mouse to steve apple. so how many people know that two of the biggest innovations that created apple came from sri? the mouse and then siri, right? >> yep. and so i also got the sense from some of the earlier interviews of yours that identify seen that you dislike -- i've seen that you dislike the term think tank. >> ooh, no. we think really hard. we are a do tank. [laughter] until you get, until you get the research, we do lots of really fundamental research, don't get me wrong. you know, we think hard. but our folks really are motivated to do, get the work

that we do out to help people. so if it's a new drug, two years ago we came out with a new drug for a terrible cappser there -- cancer there hadn't been a previous therapeutic for that. so to us, that's a huge win when we can do something like that. not only do the research. now we're working on alzheimer's, there's a whole portfolio of things. and the goal is, yes, to do great research, but it's how to you really -- how do you really help the world, how do you make an impact on the world. it's the sense of achievement and impact that really motivate people. and it's what the valley's all about. it's why people are here tonight, you know? it's how do we get better at this, how do we do a better job, make a bigger impact. >> and at times like this in the valley when it's so overheated and there's such an urge to start up, does that make things difficult for you as a manager and sort of -- i mean, do you face cherry picking?

i know you've set up a mechanism for your people to go out. >> yes. >> but how much does that protect you from -- >> i would say if we didn't have our policy of commercialization, then there'd always -- people do want to see their work get out into the marketplace. so if we didn't help them do that, the natural urge would be, which often happens with big companies, the only thing they can do is leave, right? because the company decides they're not interested in that project, you know, for good reason. but they have no choice. in our case we have a really proactive, thoughtful process. so if we have a great idea hike what bill -- like what bill and ray and the others did with calo, the first reaction we have is, you know, where can we go with this. and we start incubating. and, actually, bill and norman incubated it for three years before we finally spun be it out. it was a long time, and our people have learned that unless we do that homework, unless we really stick to the fundamentals, you can't be

successful. you know, i don't know what the numbers are. m of our venture friends here can tell us, but an incredible percentage of venture capitalists don't make money, you know? and, but some make money pretty much all the time. [laughter] and, you know, the way i think about it is the really good ones and the partners we've had are the ones who really stick to the fundamentals. they really, they understand that when you form a company, you're in to olympics, you know? it's not to olympics in your backyard where you can pole vault over the chair. you're competing at the global innovation economy where everybody knows what you're doing, they hear about it instantaneously so there's no hiding. so you have to realize the bar isn't here, it's up here. so you really want to work -- it's one of the reasons why we always talk about who's the best partner, who should we be working with on this, how do we assemble the best teams? because we're all in to olympics

now. the worldwide olympics. we can't hide anymore. so some of this is driven by that. >> you have this very systematic innovation model. where did it come from? dud you bring it with you when you came to sri? >> i brought some of it, some of it was here. i would say i'm very passionate about teaching innovation, the fundamentals of innovation. and one of the things i helped bring was a very systematic process for that. so we have workshops that we give to our people on the fundamentals of innovation. we've had thousands of senior executives from all over the world. bbc, swiss com, all kinds of companies you'd recognize. most companies don't have an innovation process. it's hard to believe, right? given the importance of it. and there's a simple test you can all do when you go back to your companies which is ask a middle-level professional to describe the company's innovation process. and if they can't describe it,

there is none. [laughter] it's that simple. and you will, you'll discover, you'll find only a handful of companies that really have a thoughtful way to help their people think about doing things that matter, big, important problems. everything starts there, right? and all the other things that come underneath that. >> and is that, you know with, there's a lot of hand wringing over the last two decades a about the decline of basic be research in america. and is that -- so if you talk about innovation, is there stuff within that framework that you would call basic research that goes on at sri? >> absolutely. >> encourage it and -- >> no. the goal is always to do better research. so, yes, absolutely, you know? let's pick on the big, important problems. let's have better partners. let's stick to the fundamentals of what we need to do and the kind of ideation you need to be constantly doing if you want to solve the big, important problems of the world with. so absolutely. i always say this is the best

time in the history of the world to be doing what we're doing. i'm appalled when i read articles about the end of innovation and there are no opportunities. it is just so crazy to me, right? when every field is wide open. i mean, you could have talked here for 12 hours with bill about the future of ai and never gotten to the end of it. but the same thing is happening in medicine with the regenerative medicine and a whole bunch of things we can talk about. or energy. no matter what our politicians say, we don't have the energy technologies we need at the cost we need them. and you can just go down the line. what's happening with education with the advent of mooks and blended learning. there has never, ever been in my career a period like this with more huge opportunities. but you've got to have the right skills to be able to identify those opportunities and to make them come to life. >> since you are an organization that watches education carefully, even benchmarks it, what is your sense of mooks?

what do they mean for education? >> mooks, i say we're in the mook 0.1 era. there's still basically, you know, repeating what goes on in the classroom. but, um, i was working over the weekend, last weekend with a friend, and we were skypeing a fellow in kathmandu at 15,000 feet, and we were untiling him about mooks -- telling him about mooks. and he's in this little village, and he's getting all excited because he said, my gosh, you know, i've been struggling so hard to get my education, and now i'm going to have access to the best teachers in the world at 15,000 feet. he started out as a sherpa, but he's a really smart guy, right in and for him it's like, bop, the world is now flat, right? now i can do anything. but it's not just that, it's what's going on in bundled learning. you asked about mccarthy and

engelbart -- >> blended learning, explain. >> where you augment the teacher, you don't replace them. so mooks have the, you know, my little joke about mooks is how many political science teachers does the world need? three? [laughter] maybe five. i don't know. [laughter] but that's not what, that's not what's going to change education in america. we're going the change america by giving teachers for the first time tools that augment their teaching ability. we have a program teaching algebra because that's the nexus of, i dare say everybody in this room got through algebra, and if they didn't, they wouldn't be here, right? if you don't get through algebra, you can't be an auto mechanic today because you can't read a graph. you're stuck. and if you go to the top metropolitan cities in america, the disadvantaged kids, less than 50% of them get through. and if you go to detroit, it's less than 25%.

imagine that. what i always say when i mention that is if an enemy did that to us, we'd go to war with them, and we're doing it to ourselves. so getting, getting kids so they can participate in this world is what i call this world of abundance and the global innovation economy, they can only participate in it if we can get them educated. otherwise they're going to be angry, they're going to feel like they're in a world of scarcity, and we can't have a great country. but for the first time in all the years we worked on education, we can actually see tools now we've actually used with thousands of kids across texas and florida with our great partners there, and we have a trial going in london right now with kids from bangladesh and the middle east and others. and basically, we're getting the same results in both cases. if you test how they're doing today, about 50% of the kids learn newal yes da -- algebra, and about 10% learn a hot.

they have one of those great teachers. and be we can basically reverse that. 50% of the kids are up where the great teachers are, and everybody gets through -- >> and that's based on blended, what you'd call blended? >> blended learning. and the reason it works is when you design it correctly, you can teach the way we learn the best. so you can teach, well, if you want to learn, you want to do it, you have to do it, you want to have immediate feedback, you want to have multiple representations because we all learn in different ways, you want to do it in teams, you want to have a mentor. mentors are incredibly powerful. and you want to have the right incentives. if you can include those principles, kids learn really fats. and we found the way to do that. we teach with stories, numerics, graphs and little motion examples. and it's all been built together. and we teach the fundamentals of

algebra using this technology. so we don't replace the whole curriculum, we only replace a little piece. but it's enough to have this profound be impact on learning. >> and has it been deployed at the state level, or are you getting traction in terms of getting it out into classrooms on a -- >> so we're working our way through this, you know, the first thing we had to do was prove that it works, and we had to prove that it worked with every demographic group. so we've done that. with rich kids, poor kids, every nationality you can think of, non-english-speaking kids. it's not the smart kids you worry about, right? they find a way. you have to prove that it works with the most disadvantaged kids. and that's what we've been able to do over the last couple of years. and now we're working to take it to the next step. >> is -- so recently, mit rolled out this automated assessment tool which was greeted with a great deal of controversy. it's open source, and they

assert that in certain conditions it does as well as human graders. maybe this is actually a question for bill, too, in terms of the state of that technology or the potential. i mean, one, can it be with as good as a human grader and, two, is it obvious that we should deploy it on a large scale? >> let me take a little piece, and bill can add to it. so it depends on what you're trying to do, right? but i do think the future of mooks and blended learning is automated assessment so you know in realtime how the student's doing. it will, you will have a computer tutor as part of it as well. obviously, you're going to have rich multimedia collateral information as part of it. so mooks over time are going to become a platform that's more like what i described what we can do with blended learning. we're going to be able to add from a computer point of view bit by bit other time those capabilities to mooks.

and once we do that, we're past the version 1.0 mook technology. >> okay. >> i'm very optimistic about the future of automatic assessment. i don't have any way to judge this particular one. >> yeah. >> but i think there's technology that's becoming available that's going to make that a reality. >> yeah. so let's move a little bit beyond computing. i wanted to delve a little bit into some of the other areas, and i was just wondering if there are -- so siri's gotten so much attention. [laughter] is there anything in the medicine and energy areas, for example, biotech, that has that potential? or would you call out sort of work that you've done that is on that level? what about energy first, actually? >> well, we work on a number of energy technologies. they tend to be, they're long and hard-term. so we have low-cost silicone, a bunch of things that with we're

doing. here's one the audience might appreciate in the medicine space. if any of you have diabetes or some other ailment where you have to take pills or injections often, you know, the problem is that you take the drug, it goes up to a peak, it probably goes above the level you want so if it goes up too high, you have a side effect from it. and then it tall falls down, and now it has no therapeutic value. so there are drugs where you have to take them every two hours. well, nobody does that. so we've actually invented a platform technology that'll attach itself to a drug so instead of the drug doing this every time you take it, it actually goes like this. so instead of having to take the drug every two hours, you can take it once a week concern. >> how to? what's the mechanism for

delivery? >> i'm not at liberty to say that -- [laughter] >> can you say if it's not injected? >> it's really clever. [laughter] >> and fda approval, are you at that stage of applying? >> we're still working on it. here's the other advantage of it, there are a lot of drugs you can't take today because the side effects are so bad. and so we're, by developing this platform, we think we're going to open up hundreds of drugs that haven't been used before for cancer and diabetes and other kinds of diseases that can make that kind of an impact. so it's a big deal. >> many i saw that both of you, actually, were at a workshop earlier this week at, or maybe it was last week at sri on robotics and the work and i, you know, bill was p optimistic about the transition. how, how are you feeling about the deployment of automation

testimonies and the impact -- technologies and the impact they'll have on the work force? are we going to get through this transition without huge economic consequences? negative ones? >> well, so the big issue, um, is, you know, are robots going to create more jobs or eliminate more jobs, right? that's the big, one of the big issues. this has always come up. we've always created more jobs. but you never can prove that when you're in midle of it. so, you know, 20 years ago i was having this debate about knowledge technologies, and i'd say to my friends, well, you know, we've always done it before. he's one way to think about it. so probably all of you have heard about the long pail, you know, so that the idea is here's the number of customers you have in a given company, and over here you have the number of companies. so there's a, let's say in today's world how many customers

does facebook have, a billion? let's say they have a billion, okay? so they're the biggest company in the wld in t of customers. and down over here you've got a company that has one customer. they'll make additive chocolate sculptures of your friends for you one at a time. [laughter] i wouldn't say that would meet the normal sri criteria, but never nevertheless, you get the idea. so there's a distribution of companies. so imagine what's going to happen though. some company's going to be up around five billion. and the number of companies that make smaller numbers of, smaller number of customers going to go way out there too. be and so there's going to be a line between those. now, i'm sure we could name lots of the ones that are going to be the really big ones, and we can have a lot of fun and name a lot of the small ones.

but i dare say i have no idea how many there are in the middle. that's where the jobs are. and i don't think we can imagine what they are. so i don't know your answer. all i know is i think there's going to be thousands of opportunities in there that we can't even imagine. >> yeah. i think that's a real answer. so, you know, over the years from time to time sri's been involved in some really edgy technology research. i mean, even parapsychology over the history. and, actually, some of the edgiest stuff is some of the most interesting. i don't know if you'd call it edgy or just interesting, you're managing now, for example, the hat creek observatory. and -- >> what are we doing in that? >> have you found any aliens recently? [laughter] >> no. >> not in space. [laughter] >> we, we didn't take it over for that purpose.

>> yes. >> but somebody in the room may be interested, i don't know. what we use it for is, um, we're working on the next generation of satellites. they're called cube sates. they're little satellites. they're about this big. and you can put them up with $100,000 satellite. or you can put a bunch of them onto a bigger satellite, and they kind of squirt out into the air. the problem is when they squirt out into the air, you know, let's say ten of these at once, you can't really sort them out fast enough. and so we're using that particular radar rate to be able to track small satellites as they go around the earth. and these small satellites will be used for all kinds of things, for navigation and communication and lots of things, surveillance. agriculture, that sort of thing. >> do you guys have activities and drones? do you design drones? >> we certainly do computer vision sorts of things with drones and other things.

but, um, to my knowledge, we respect building drones, are we? no. okay. [laughter] >> and you're also, you're also still managing -- is that right? >> yes. we run the world's biggest observatory, and it's part of the basic research we do. we do a lot of atmospheric research. we do, you know, upper atmosphere research for lots of reasons. we invented one of the most revolutionary advances in re daughter science -- radar science to be able to see what's going on in the upper atmosphere for global warming and a whole bunch of reasons. we don't know very much what's going up there. and most radars, you know, you see them, they're these big things that move very slowly. you've seen the kind of dishes. like the dish up on stanford hill, they look like that. this one doesn't look like that. it's just this flat ray about as big as half a football field,

and it's got 10,000 small radars in it in an array. and what you do is you change the phase of those 10,000 individual radars, and so depending on how the wave front comes out, you can actually sweep the signal through the upper atmosphere. so it's the first time ever we'll actually be able to take a dynamic picture like a video picture of what's happening in the upper atmosphere. >> for climate modeling or -- >> climate modeling, navigation, solar flux, you know, the kind of radiation that's coming down from -- we've got ones up in the, toward the north pole primarily right now. >> so given both of your expertise, yours and displays, one of the hot topics in silicon valley is google glass right now. and -- [laughter] one of the most interesting criticisms that i -- not create

is schisms, critiques, and i know it's way too early to say anything about it, the people who use it love it, and people who have to talk to people who are wearing gloog google glass hate it. which i think is interesting -- identify only put one on once, i have no teach experience here. but just your interpretations of your notion of augmented reality and your notion of display. i'm just wondering if you expect these things to be ubiquitous, that we'll be instrumented. >> oh, yes, i do. i don't know whether they will look like google glass, okay? and i don't know whether they're going to be intrusive enough to have that problem of am i talking to this person or am i not talking to this person. >> where right. >> but i'm very confident that we're going to walk around with lots of computational device cans that will help us -- devices that will help us see things, hear things and connect. >> i have a pair. john, i hope it didn't bother you too much.

[laughter] >> that's the next generation. they work really well. >> they're terrific. >> but in terms of, let me ask you, i've heard there are limited factors to even the best augmented reality in terms of the biological aspect, something like 15% of the people who put on augmented reality no matter how perfect they are, they get sick anyway. >> they do. people have different reactions. and we still basically can only pay attention to one thing at a time which is why it's kind of annoying when somebody has got a display right there, and they're paying attention to it, and you're hoping they'll pay attention to you. >> yeah. >> but for a lot of things, you know, if you're sitting there in the audience, perfect. ..

>> the fact that we limit those really smart people from coming into the united states is a really beknighted, feckless thing to do. i can't imagine. so the answer is, no, we do not have enough of these. [applause] i don't have a strong view on that, by the way. [laughter] >> this is a question for curt. how do you see your physics background help with what you're doing? any advice for physics students in college? if you had a chance to choose physics again, would you choose it again? >> well, everybody should study physics, right? >> go into computer science. [laughter] >> i actually think it's very helpful for me in two ways, one of which because it's kind of a broad fundamental background and because sri does so many different things that really

helps. but the other thing they drive home in physics is to come up with simple, fundamental solutions. as simple as possible, but no simpler. it doesn't give you a perspective of trying to always figure out how do we come to the essence of this? this is one of the things we teach everybody at sri, what's the key insight into that problem that would make it really work? i gave you one about education. those six things that i mentioned. that's the key insight into solving our problem. if you don't have that key insight into that, you'll create like 99% of the educational software out this, you'll create a game that may be fun, but it doesn't educate. you've got to have, you've got to really have that specter. and i think physicists have that drilled into them. it's just part of the discipline. >> do you find that for a spinout to be successful, you must spin out the key participants with it? >> no.

>> no. [laughter] >> interesting. >> the, so what we find, as i told you, these ideas are decades in the making. we find these disruptive opportunities. we bring in an entrepreneur. we often, especially nowadays, we bring in not just the ceo-to-be, but also the vp of engineering or cto-to-be, and be they often have a technical team, okay? so our people, most of them, aren't the right people to go and spin off. some of them are and system of them go, and that's fine. but i don't think it's essential at all to have people who created that technology decades ago go. >> do you have people round trip? do people go out and come back? >> we do, indeed. several of them have done several round trips. [laughter] and we're always happy to see them back. >> you see if we were a big company, the team would all have to leave to take the technology with them. but because we actively incubate

it, the technology transfer part is taken care of. because, you know, we're all one family working on this to make sense out of it. >> okay. um, here's one hard and one maybe easy. what are the top three innovations/impact the world for sri -- let me just ask that. >> the top three. >> the top three innovations from sri. >> well, what do you say about the computer mouse, windows hypertext and a bunch of other things? that's got to be up there, right? intuitive surgical is a $27 billion company that started the whole revolution, i think phil green who did that work is here tonight. that's a pretty big one. i would say going forward the work we're doing in digital education may top everything. because if we don't educate our kids, nothing else matters. it doesn't can matter what the government does, it doesn't

matter what we do. if half the population can't participate, america's got a huge problem. so there's three. >> yep. what is the ratio of ph.d.s to your 2500 employees? >> i don't know sri wide. my group's about 50%. >> here's another top three question. [laughter] what are the top three important problems to of? >> oh. >> i don't know why three. [laughter] >> i've already mentioned education twice, bill. [laughter] want to throw one out? >> um, i think the, you mentioned this issue of putting technology into the world in a way that people can adapt to it. i think that's a really important problem. and i think that's what successful technologies do. >> so i'll mention another one that might surprise you. i actually think it's the way we innovate. we're doing a terrible job at

innovation. if you take any measure of innovative performance in the national labs or other labs around the world, you know, people are very frustrated that their ability to actually with get things done and make the impact that they want to and they're capable of doing. and we've become convinced having thousands of people come to sri is that they haven't figured out a way, it's the question again of getting the barriers out of the way. google has a process that's very effective, but most places don't. and i think if we could transform that, we're working with the air force research labs right now and others, i think we could -- well, let me put it this way. um, when we went through the demming era where we went from product quality to high product quality and low cost, that difference was thousands to one. it wasn't a little thing, it was like, oh, my goodness. this really is a completely different world. when i'm being very, very

conservative, i say we can improve our output by 100%. i actually think it's more like 500-1,000% for innovation as well if we all kind of got together about what really works. >> is there a region of the world that's doing a better job than the united states? is there a region of the world that's doing a better job than the u.s.? >> probably not. i mean, silicon valley's a singularity in every way. there's no place like this, right? with so many brilliant people who really spent their lives understanding how to do this. but there are always great people everywhere you go who do know what to do, right? >> this is a democracy question. any plan to work on a version 2.0 voting system, transparent, open source with strong encryption? [laughter] >> ay, ay, ay. we do look at voting systems. it turns out to be a really hard problem. i'm not optimistic about a solution to that soon.

>> yeah. >> okay. go ahead. no? effects of patent policy on innovation, what are the effects of patent policy, the current patent policy? >> well, there are two parts of that. one the recent changes, first the file. i think that favors big companies a little more than i would like, but i don't think it's the end of the world. the second is, you know, what's going on with patent litigation right now which has gotten to be a much bigger issue. i'm not sure what we do about that, it's just a fact of life. and we all have to put up with it. i don't know how to fix that. >> okay. i think this is, this is a good question to end on, and and they're asking can you describe the innovation process in a few words? [laughter] >> yes. yes. yes. so the first thing is you need

to have a common vocabulary to describe the process of innovation. go home and try this experiment with your teams. have them write down the definition of innovation, customer value and a value proposition on post-it notes and stick them on the wall. if they don't have reasonable agreement, then you just, your organization's going slower than it should. that's number one. do they have, do you have a process where people come together and do ideation in a serious way on a regular basis? not brainstorming meetings, ones that are really driven on a regular basis with the right people in the room. and in our ventures group, we have our venture friends who come every six weeks and spend the better part of the day with us as one of the teams on a regular basis to critique and involve some of the best people in the world to make our ideas better, avoid the nih rob and lots of other things -- problem and lots of other things. easter a very specific thing you

can use now for the rest of your life. a value pop proposition the way we describe with it is what's the big, important need, what's the approach to address that need? is it unique, is it defensible? what are the benefits or cost of that particular approach to address that need? that's the value of the idea. and why is that better than the competition or the alternatives? so we simply call it nabc. an important need with a unique, compelling approach with superior benefits per cost and compared to the competition or the alternatives. just having that simple framework so that every presentation addresses those four questions makes a huge difference. most presentations that you see in universities in particular, we make a joke about them. we call them big as. they're all about the approach. so, um, you know, a typical presentation in most places says what the world needs is a five

gigging bit per second -- gig a bit per second communication system. the benefits for cost are you will have a five gigabit per second -- [laughter] and there's no competition because ours goes at five, and the other one goes at 4.9999. [laughter] so you can see that ours is a lot better. [laughter] so, you know, it sounds like a joke with. it kind of is a joke. but those of you who listen to lots of presentations will recognize the truth of that. so having a language and metrics and standard processes makes a huge difference. >> with thank you both. you're right, i could have spent two hours talking to bill just about ai probably. [applause] >> coming up next, a look at

social media with the ceo of twitter, dick costolo. then more on the topic as a house subcommittee looks at social media's use during hurricane sandy, the boston marathon bombings and other emergencies. ..

>> in washington twitter as become the talk of the town for actually being committed from very famous prison sites in the program there were of reporting about cross-country data collection and the federal government's intelligence gathering. and i will start with this, just simply how did twitter stay out of prison? >> i think the way i would answer that is we have taken what i think this is very specific principled appro to requests for users information which can be generally summed up as when we receive specific legal requests in the countries in which we operate public u.s. first and foremost, we react to those requests and do what we need to do and a bay the rule of

law. when we receive broad requests we push back to insure that they are legally valid. we challenge requests that we have -- which is very public about cases like wikileaks, for example, and challenging and request that we have not deemed to be valid in defense of our users rights to know whether information is being requested. i guess i would leave it at that. you know, we are not petulant about our responses. think we have a principled stance and tried to the cross that line. every received a request we feel is too broad, we do pushed back. >> it is difficult. it is like we are dancing around this thing that is called prism. does it bother you that you can't be talking more about your relationship with the government

in these sorts of requests? >> the interesting thing for me, i have commented on this kind of thing polk did before in the context of requests in the u.k. for a kind of an junction in the u.k. that is referred to as a super injunction in which an injunction is issued that not only are you not allowed to say this and balls of soccer player having an affair with this person, but you're not allowed to say there is an injunction preventing you -- the not allowed to say that. in those kinds of things have always seemed -- to me. so those kinds of things, and those kind of situations are different globally in different countries, but they're just generally disturbing. we have called for and would

like to see more transparency around these types of requests. >> petitioned the government to be able to disclose the number of requests. break them apart so that there can be more clarity on the specific intelligence requests? says something you support and would like to see? >> we have not taken a formal position, but generally speaking our own counsel has tweeted support for the position of google on this. google issues her own transparent -- transparency reports in the way they respond. we do the same thing. we have another report coming out and about a month on the request that we receive between the beginning of the year and will will be about a week from now. we would like to see more transparency from other

companies in our field and in reaction to this specific comments you're making about google. generally we would call for more transparency. >> one thing you're general counsel has said is that philosophically -- >> very good. >> you start with the philosophy that your users own their own data. is that right? can you talk about that? to you believe that there can be privacy in this age and social media and that users have that to -- they can expect privacy? >> the answer to your first question is, yes, we absolutely believe that users -- that there can be privacy. the thing that is because the technology is possible does not mean that you don't cut down the path of having a reasonable discussion about what should and should not be done with that.

obviously we will start seeing this kind of discussion happen around things like your location services and whether they should be all of them are not and it is okay to, says the device is capturing that information if it is okay for applications to be using it in passing it around to third parties. as a reasonable discussions and the kind that users should expect everyone to be having. i absolutely believe it is perfectly reasonable to have an a expectation of privacy and is incumbent upon policymakers to figure that out in a way that obviously does not hamper the kind of innovation that users want to leverage. >> he think that users should be able top-10? >> our jeter services are often. we think that works. we make it easy and obvious.

it starts off by default. that is the reasonable expectation that people should have. as long as you provide them with that ability, i do want to say that this tree is tired from this particular street corner. then great. the user knows that and has answered that question in the affirmative. >> if you are trying to gather news as a reporter or follow news as an editor or just as a regular reader, it's hard not to be on twitter. even though the last two days finding the missing red panda from the national zoo was all over twitter. last night, the texas filibuster was pretty amazing to watch the uprising and the role that twitter played in all this. >> and then being the number one trending topic.

>> you have any stephane how many people were -- >> while that was happening it had become the number one trend in the country. >> a local event the became national. it's sort of begs the question, what is twitter? are you a news organization? >> two different questions. the answer to what is twitter, we think about it as a global town square where public real-time or live -- public live conversational media is distributed. we feel that we are the only company that really brings all of those characteristics, public real time conversational and widely distributed. we just heard in the introduction and discussion about embedded tweed's to go

everywhere, not just the twitter application, but other web sites and print and some morales. read the only service that provides the capability, and those in aggregate create a global town square. your question about is it a news organization, we think of twitter as a technology company in the media business. technologists' first, 50 percent of the employees are engineers. that is actually a statistic that we try to stick to make sure that we are focused first and foremost on technology and the future of the technology. we don't to any analysis or synthesis of the information. in that regard no. i don't think of ourselves as a news organization. we don't report on the tweet said come in. in this global towns where the people of saying what they're saying and we think we are very

complementary, of course is the responsibility of journalists to analyze and editorialize and sympathize and security information that is coming in, separate the signal from the noise, provide more depth. even go farther to say that one of the reasons we push and invest so hard and embedded tweets in the notion is just the ability see is our api for free and go embed them. and one of the reasons we do that is because we think of our services so complementary. plant them in their own pages.

>> it feels like oftentimes the breaking news of live events, particularly natural disasters, newtown, boston, or the wars are breaking the news on twitter. put up the link, but how does this contribute back to the new organization? >> the participants in the news are broadcasting was happening. newtown especially during -- you can think of any unplanned event . really data and to personally, the boston marathon. he was running it. the horrified the chip to record your miles to a twitter account.

then we had seen that he had crossed mile to five. the rf id to. so in some sense yes. [laughter] i guess that's true. he crossed mile 25. we saw the news of the explosions. sort of riveted personally to see what is happening there. raw held up a half mile short of the finish line done a lot going on. in those kinds of cases it is the participant is telling you was going on and reporting photos and videos. i think that is the world we live in now. hundreds of millions of people on this platform. they are everywhere. they're in japan during the earthquake and in suing tsunami.

that is going to be the case that that is where the first reports come from. and that think it's incumbent on news organizations and journalists to understand that this is just a raw feed of stuff pouring in. 500 treats in dana. it took three years in two months for the first billion to be sent. now there are billions into every today's. as this feed grows ever more populated is an ever bigger will to curate, synthesize, analyze, and help everyone understand. >> and how the you -- what are your observations on accuracy in those kinds of evidence? this seems like there is some much information. >> i think that particularly in the aftermath of chaotic events

in the tragic boston marathon bombing but also the oklahoma city bombing, it has always been the case that there is rumor and innuendo. again, the oklahoma city bombing, there was discussion in the aftermath that they're looking for this many men who appear to be of this ethnicity and appeared to have gone off in this kind of car. and that is just the nature of how information pours in in the aftermath of these chaotic events. the same is true on any platform including ours when someone thinks they hear one thing and the police scanner and right that and actually it was never said but something else entirely. ..

>> i think again it is what people are saying. in this public town square we are not playing the role more incredible than that. and we look to -- i want the news organizations that partner with us to play that role. i don't think that you are great at it and have been doing it for years and years and years. we are going to be the distribution mechanism.

>> won the event that happened recently is when a security related issue that the news industry solve a lot of terror and that the ap tauter handle was attacked. talk about -- and they are pretty big because of that because of a false tweet. what is twitter doing and what is your role and responsibility in the town square and global platform to make sure the right people are tweeting the right thing and their identities -- >> we take our responsibilities as this -- assisting the account seriously. so our security team and our media team spent a great deal of time with sources like yours and the associated press and reuters

and on and on and helping them understand best practices for securing those accounts, number two, the kind of ways in which those accounts get usually spearfishing attacks which are the phishing e-mail to tons of people and hope with some of them click on the link and give you their id and password, a spear phishing at attack as for the credentials are asked for and if you try to convince people that they should click on this link and enter some data that they shouldn't. but we have also recently spent a bunch of time and energy adding that to factor authentication to twitter for the high security accounts. the authentication for those of you not familiar with it, really a factor can be something you know, something you are or something you have.

the factor authentication is something you know, a password, something you have, a felony and you have to do things like enter your password and the code we sent to the mobile phone tied to the account so if you know the password you can't just get in. so those kind of additional security measures to lock down these things even further are investing a lot of time come investing lots of personal resources, personnel resources rather, and money come engineering dollars. we will continue to do that because people will start to try to figure out the right way to hack into the authenticated accounts and we will spend more time on that. >> and a couple of their very recent events that really show the ubiquity of twitter globally have been in the demonstrations in turkey and in brazil. the turkish prime minister

called you at twitter a menace to society because so much of the protests were on the ground from the park tweeting. but at the same time he has something like 3 million followers and he tweets several times a day. turkey has asked from data from you and facebook. facebook a few minutes ago issued a statement saying they haven't responded to that request. talk a little bit about your role as this global town square. using often with the challenges are. you know, we talked about the death requests domestically. what is happening globally? >> i think one of the fascinating things about this global town square it is increasingly -- there is increasingly less fiction for

people to see the other people who feel the same way they do about the issues or to see and hear those who feel differently about them and that has resulted in these fascinating consequences. in the aftermath of the awakening we had a group of scholars come to the twitter office and we talked about the fact that was amazing to them they could see on the social services like twitter but there were female scholars in pakistan who felt similar about the issue they were concerned about in a way they'd never been able to see or hear before so it is compelling. that is what makes it a global town square. the same thing is happening as you mentioned in turkey and

brazil even though they are very different circumstances you now see the protesters in brazil conversing with the protesters in turkey showing the solidarity in the things they believe to be from which is fascinating and you've never seen before. with regards to requests, i think that this is and be a very fluid situation and i expect to continue to revolve. again when we get broad requests for things that we do not feel are legally valid or appropriate requests we push back on those and aggressively. but we also it's fair to say we are not petulant understanding

we have to obey the rule will fall. if there are legal requests in the countries that we operate and we need to react to we will do that. in this specific case it is very fluid and will evolve rapidly. >> is there a movement to shut down twitter in more countries that you see? >> i still cannot. in china they act as a platform. we would love to not to be blocking this country and have friction with access to all the people in those countries. right now it is the global town square and we would like it to truly be the town square. i hope that in the future we

will be able to operate in those countries but we are not going to sacrifice the principles of the platform in the way we think users should be able to communicate in order to do so. >> is there a way to work in china to coordinate? >> for those of you that may not be familiar with that it is a permit that was launched by the chinese internet company fema s.a. twitter like platform almost exactly like it, 140 characters, etc.. we would love to be able to run twitter in china. >> at this convention i think there's been quite a bit of talk about the future of news and the

pay wall, one to talk about financial models. there is a lot of discussion and debate on what is the right way and the right course to go to the of what are your thoughts on subscriptions when it comes to the on-line distribution? >> that is much more your expertise than mine. i'm going to make a diversion and come back to questions. he said to me it's funny the chellie will get upset. you have to be the founder to be the ceo of a company and then no, no, you need to bring a professional ceo. look what jeff link in the and

on and on. i think the reality is that, you know, each of these people in the valley and whether it is a founder or the professional ceo they have this kind of super power and some weakness and at various times people either for get one or the letter and the personal ingenious that ever existed. and i feel that we about this model. people would go no, no, no. that's crazy. and then some other witness. people are crazy, how could they have bought that. the reality is some correct balance that works. so, i think that i am impressed with how some of the bank's have worked and there's a proper balance between the conscription and advertising. again.

one of the reasons that we distribute the platform service for free is so that you can bolster and advertiser and them and we don't participate in their revenue and that's fine. >> let's talk about a business model that you know at twitter. what does the future hold for twitter in terms of moving to video, the second experience you talk about a lot which is to better accompanying -- twitter accompanying the live tv events. where do you see the money being made on the 140 text tweets. >> twitter complement's tv in that twitter and tv are just remarkable together. wh and the event now

without my device in front of me or that water stream in front of me feels like the volume is off. the founder of the company that we purchased recently it's like the soundtrack for tv. it will emerge in the symbiotic relationship are things like to name in it. we launched a program called twitter amplify in which we will provide users with a short segment of something that happened on that show like a sporting event. labron blocking the first dunk. the first few seconds to amend now on this particular channel.

so those are compelling and useful and i think that they will be the business models for the broadcasters because even in the launching of it we were in bed in the super short act. three seconds in advance of the videos and those are -- those are new money for every participant. they have been super successful. the users love them and highlight something that literally just happened. so if you are in the home office or something. you see this happening like i have to watch the game in the fourth quarter it is tied. and then i think we will also see amplified the use as it is deleting that to the pre-record it shows. said the first up is pretty little lie -- liars is about to

air so here are the first few seconds. those text version of those tweets are already having. the 140 characters with the associated canvas of a short video will be a great evolution. i really think more and more of twitter as the 140 characters as a caption to the canvas that can be much more rich. it might be a video. it might actually be an application. so, you can imagine again at the news organization is investing a wires poll on twitter and which is the whole question and the canvas is the poll and ask people answer it the data changes and you might say 90 seconds until this closes, the beauty of it being a tweet it can be embedded in "washington

post" about, and one of persons twitter tablet and others on the anne gurley the phone and desktop and everywhere else. so that evolution as we think about the platform i think that towards the end of this year will become more and more rich and could and tv, atwitter amplifies the first take at that. >> so the news and the newspaper language when we think of the captain's and i've heard it referred to as envelope different content. what we see today, the stream which is navigate the beat could difficult to navigate. will that change as well? >> the general nature of the stream will actually be pretty close to what it is today. i like the cap.

it's easy how you can start to go down the path where things get too noisy to quickly and then if people are singing for example i can see the problem already let's just say they will always be preopening the stream because they are highly engaged where is the lion the photographs and the audio our expanded but nothing else. we will experiment with some stuff and see what works with the simplicity of the product

tacking things on to it. >> can we talk a little bit about your cultural influence coming and with all due respect, sometimes i -- [inaudible] [laughter] know, it would be good. it is a little overwhelming. there is a sort of feeling and anxiety that you are on when you are on to better and can be a little distracting to the do you feel twitter is sometimes contributing to much malaise in society? is our attention span to small? how do you get -- [inaudible] [laughter]

>> not comfortable with how indefensible it is. >> how do you use it? you are an important person. you are the ceo of a company with 200 million users. how do you use twitter effectively so that it doesn't bog you down. >> you get to choose who you follow so your home stream is what you want it to be carried so it can be as noisy or quiet as you like based on the volume and the variety of the account that you follow. i try to go ahead and prune the list of accounts that i follow with some regularity if i feel like this is getting too much noise our these accounts don't have a value to me. people should be doing that for themselves on a regular basis. i do think that has actually saved me a remarkable amount of

time. in that i don't have to go check in number of sources i used to check regularly for any update on this and i can just look at my time line on twitter. the main feed on twitter come and see if there is anything new in a particular thing that i'm interested in. >> you only follow 300 people. you have a follower. >> that was up and down the number of accounts i follow. sometimes it is 200 sometimes it is 400. i change it on things in investigating about the product. like how does this particular -- how does this particular group of users meet the product why is it different than the way people use it etc to read estimate on a daily basis how do you consumer news? if you wake up at 5 a.m., do you

pick up the new speaker at home? >> i follow a bunch of news accounts on plater for a variety of subjects and then i will read the detailed article about my favorite thing. i read more detailed articles because my time on to better than i would otherwise just because i wouldn't be able to have more or think to check that variety of sources. >> how are we on time? okay roomful of managers and editors of newspapers and one thing i interest can you do as a leader you have what is called teatime. it's off the record weekly sessions with your employees. on hand, so it's everybody.

what is the value of that and tell us why you do this. >> it was instituted long before i got there. it's very important to me that everybody understand. so i tell my managers this all the time i teach a class called managing twitter. it's a six hour class i basically stand up in front of the new managers in the company or experienced managers the we have hired and say here's what i want you to manage. i have a couple pages of notes to remind me of what to say that it's an interactive session and i start by saying if you pass out for five hours and 55 minutes of this and hear only one thing make sure everybody's understands what you understand. so many leadership problems stem from individual contributors not

having the context managers have and the management thinking the of the context. part of what i try to do at this meeting teatime is to go through and the answer five employee questions so we have an internal pull they can vote up or down a question and the answer the top five. after a board meeting i would stand up in front of the company and say this is what we talked about at the board meeting. this was the board's concern and here is how we responded to their concern and what they want to see more of next time. everybody in the company sees exactly what the strategic match record looks like and where we are against or quarterly goals and that we also update week to week. so everybody has the same context exit in the week for what's going on when you don't have the left hand and right

hand thinking of things. we do that with a bunch of other -- much of the folks are managers and we extended that broadly throughout the company in the san francisco quarters none of the conference rooms are frosted glass with a couple exceptions. they are all completely clear so you can see what's going on in the company. there are two public conference rooms in the lobby and a very big one for the sales meetings the engineers that set up the conference got tired of getting distracted by probably doing jumping jacks in the sales meeting and they asked. with those exceptions you can see what's going on in any conference room in the company and any meeting of more than a couple people you have to send out notes for that meeting and

anyone else in the company can subscribe to the notes from that meeting. >> the benefit of those you are at a red light behind some suv, the light turns green and the people in the left start getting into the prison in front of you doesn't. 99.9% of the people in this room don't think of themselves their must be something horrible going on in that car for the person in front of that car otherwise they would be moving. we are all going like come on, go. if the top of the car was wrecked off and you could see the driver was having an emergency with a bb in the back seat or someone crossing the street in front of the karkh you'd say okay i have to sit here and wait now that i see what's going on obviously i'm not going to haul get this person. the same thing is true n the company. when you have people over here engineering and those people are

sales what do these guys do all day and what do these people do all day? it's not as fun a place to work and the context of what everyone mif i'm wrong forxt for. the mission statement. >> you who described the mission in a way that makes us proud how do you continue to do that as you grow and go public? >> it's always -- people ask me the question this way as you go to the company there's going to be this a desire to do the right

thing. the fascinating thing about this is that its almost always the case that the tension is between two different things to do for the users and not the right thing to do for the users. we allow people to use plater and not have to put in their real name and address and some identification. one of the reasons that is important to us is the ability to use the pseudonym facilitates the political speech in countries where it isn't particularly welcome. that's great but the flip side is i can hide behind the anonymity and go to some celebrity to the dupage and call them names and so forth. so that tension as always the tension that we struggle with and the tension between the business and the users has been

largely over dramatize and frankly fictional because my answer is always if we do the right thing for the user we will figure out a way to modify that. we should make money as an artifact of generating the best user experience and not think of them as things that have to compete with each other. so the idea is that we shelby kings and statements like this can move the line. this isn't evil. we didn't kill anyone. [laughter] yet it will allow us to look at something and say we are excited that we did this today or are we not going to tell everyone we did that because it isn't something we are particularly excited about. we would get requests in the first kind of year there we were running our advertising to let

us take over the home page today and if you change it to a football we will pay you for one day only pity we decided the those are the kind of things we did today everybody. ..

it always seems to be, it always seems to be the case if you just do this you can block these spammers. the reality is that they are extremely nimble, they change their tactics rapidly and have to come scalable solutions to deal with them.

we spend an extraordinary amount of time on the. i space in the amount of time on the. it's one of these arms races that you get what he had event and at all dies down -- dies down for a while and they have a new path around the and expect that. back and forth it goes. i think that will continue to be the case for quite some time, frankly. >> bill, "usa today." what are some of the best ways you see news organizations using twitter and what are some of the worst ways you see news organizations using twitter? >> i think some of the best ways they are using twitter are when their tweets are captions to a thoughtful analysis of something maybe even other people are reporting on. that help you understand, oh, this is a thoughtful analysis of

this other thing that's been reported on. those are the kinds of things that really draw people in because they then realize i heard that bit of news. this isn't just another tweet with that bit of news. so that's i was a very, very important way for news organizations to think about, think about that. it is the case for some news organizations, particularly those in specific subjects, matter areas, or that are known in outside social media for having a specific kind of personality. at six and helpful they bring that personality or tone of voice to the twitter account. i think that that goes not just for news organizations but for organizations in general. it's a playful brand and the twitter account is playful, that works really well. if it's a very satirical tone of voice and the twitter account is

very satirical tone of voice, that works very well. the things that don't work well at all our trying to jam the same version of the same headline that the 50 other news organizations, organic and anything, it can be sports, right? it can be athletes talk about some goal that was just score. if i'm watching a world cup game and brazil scores a goal and i'm one of the million people that tweets with a link, probably my link will not be as interesting as someone who has got some commentary about the goal. may be an assist before the go or something, if somebody to the goal scored last your something that has a link to it that drives me into that article about it. so that's what i would think about it. with a broad brush strokes. >> my name is reverend stern.

there've been people suggest the news companies need to act more like digital company to a what if you talk a little bit about how you run twitter and what news companies might learn from that. >> well, i run twitter as a very, i'm extremely open with my employees about what's going on with something. my default mode is to trust them. so when we have a very confidential project we're working on, i default to telling them all about it. so blind, twitter music, aspect of a relationship with apple like integration, early integration into ios. those were all things we told people in the company when they were ready well in advance of the public announcement. it has been the case on occasion that people within the company leaked that information and we just try to make a clear, very,

very clear that that will not be tolerated at all. we will have very much of zero-tolerance policy about it. and if you do this you may think that you are outfoxing me and hurrying fever with someone but around is that you're hurting all your fellow employees because we want to be able -- i very much default to more openness, a lot of contact was going on but when of context for what's going on they can be much more productive. our office space is completely open to there are, for example, cubicles. our for place can we try to move into space with a floor plate to really big, like a thousand square feet so people wouldn't have to go up and down stairs and up and down elevators all the time. obviously, we have grown. we have to do that more and more begin very large team can fit within one big open space. people can see what's going on and i think that's important.

>> i'm from university of kansas. i'm wondering how many applications you got for your head of news job and whether that job is still open? [laughter] >> as i understand it the job is still open, and we've gotten an extraordinary number of applications for that come and a number of other, a number of other very interesting jobs that we have open. but as i understand it, pretty sure it's the case, that position has not been filled. >> seriously, what are the priorities you see for the speech also the previous question was serious. [laughter] spent what are the first things that a person will do speak with you, so as i've been talk about the consummate the relationship between twitter in news, it's about the something that complement to relationship. so for example, as this live half a billion tweet feeds income what are the things we

can do to make sure that we are helping news organization surface of the signal in that stream where in? how to help news for positions identify, this is a fixed event that is happening right now on twitter communal, this is a filibuster in texas last night, need to pay attention to this. because otherwise with a half billion tweets going at it can start to look like, yeah, there's more information in there, there's always more information. so what are the ways we can identify is a weight in it, there's interesting going to get the same volume that something interesting is happening and everyone is coalescing around this moment. we better pay particular attention to pick we want that person to be focus on those kinds of things. and again going back to some of his earlier questions about the ap account, making sure the news or decisions are implementing all the latest technology.

>> you are in kind of a unique situation where you follow employees and if you on follow them -- they are not met speak as i follow a bunch of employers to i don't follow all of them. i definitely get employees and neptune in the leisure and say, hey, i tried to direct message which were not following me. which is their way of saying, you know, follow me. and they do sometimes i'm follow because i click around to installing and then followed and they do get grief for the. i think one of the ways i was asked by a journalist a couple months ago, if you had to describe yourself, what would you describe yourself as? i use the word president because i try to be very, i try, i'm serious. [laughter] but i can see the humor in that. i tried to make sure i'm not kind of hiding in the corner and always in the middle of what's

going on and, you know, we're only three or four floors right now. >> i have a couple more questions. i would be a bad journalist if i didn't follow my executive editors question. one quick question to you said when you get broad requests and when to get broad requests for data from the federal government, you -- >> i said from. when we get broad requests. from coming, a prosecutor in new york, it could be that. >> i will narrow that down. if you, how, can you give us a sense of how often you get broad data requests? >> i think -- >> from the government? >> to the extent we are able, we publish all that inner transparent reports, and begin our next one will go up in about

a month and it will cover the period from the beginning of the to about a week from the. so we break all that out to the extent were able to break that out. >> finally, twitter is about moments oftentimes, really sort of -- >> no, i agree with it. it's very much, you know, again going back to the sound of his company, life in the moment. >> want come in your position as leader of his company, has been the most surprising moments -- i guess the biggest side and the biggest low? any horrible moment as well as a great moment, the highest and the lowest? >> the horrible moments are usually the ones that are very, very personal to you, and i mentioned one early which was, again, being this good friend of a bunch of ours in office, he

tweets mile 23, my 24, mile 25. than nothing, explosion. you know, and you are riveted to twitter because this information is poignant and all he can think about is why haven't we heard anything? if it stopped he would've pulled out his phone. if he didn't stop them what happened? so that was probably the most personally terrifying moment from the. the moment would have a tiffany's about, oh, my gosh that could only happen on twitter, they frankly keep happening and changing in interesting ways. the conversations between the protesters in brazil and protesters in turkey was fascinating to me because they are about completely different things. and yet there's this sort of camaraderie around then. the conversations between kinds of people who would never speak to each other before, because of artificial barriers, either artificial berries of status or artificial barriers of industry

or social economic barriers are also amazing. so you get these fascinating conversations between people like the canadian hip-hop artist, drake, you know, posting the first million is the hardest. you send that out on a tweet and t. boone pickens response, the first night is a heck of a lot harder -- the first billion is a heck of a lot harder. [laughter] >> these are things we witness every day. i mention an earlier conversation, solomon rushdie will tweet out these literary hashtag libére smackdowns and say okay, this novel is or this novelist, go. then you will see like other great writers that we all know and love will chime in to the conversation with everybody else. i think, you know, because xyz. it's fascinating to see that. it's like sitting in a class

with the best novelists of the world are coming and talking about characters. so those kind of things. and again, i say this one a lot but it's my favorite one is, is around the holidays when sarah silverman tweeted if your family is driving you crazy, just pretend you're in a woody allen movie. me a fair responder, tried that and it didn't work off make the adamonis are my favorite moments. spent think is a much for joining us today. [applause] >> they have a tremendous role, and we would talk about martha, some the things she gave george but that's going to camp every winter was huge, and he's also. it wasn't just valley forge.

it was every winter of the eight long years of revolutionary war. and she hated it. you know, it was dangerous. the roads were dangerous. she was a prime object of hostagetaking. but she was key to troop morale. and he felt that very strongly, and she would organize the other officers wives, and they would have, they would cook for the soldiers. they would nurse the soldiers. they would pray with a soldier. they would put on his great entertainment for the soldiers. during the war, washington's genius was to bring the army together. washington was a good now done it without martha, that, and he begged her to come to camp so that she could work, and the troops of torture. lady washington is here. >> as we continue our conversation on first ladies, lesley stahl, cokie roberts and

science professor discuss first ladies from martha washington to michelle obama tonight at nine eastern on c-span. >> a house homeland security subcommittee recently looked into how social media platforms have become useful in quickly disseminating information during emergencies. we heard from represents at google and other private sector technology groups. this hearing is about one hour and 15 minutes. >> chairman brooks, ranking member, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and for your interest in the importance of internet-based technologies and disaster gardens, response and recovery. my nana's matthew stepka, i'm vice president part of google will use information technology to address global challenges. and make a lasting impact. people turn to the net when

there's an emergency. we want to make sure that my information is there when people need. millions of people around the world are affected by natural disasters. is two weeks ago we witnessed the devastating powers of tornadoes across oklahoma. our goal is to make it easy to give people the actual emergency information they need when they need it most. building tools enable better dedication, collaboration among the founders of those affected by crisis. providing updated imagery and maps of affected varies and donated terrible organizations that are on the ground helping to provide direct relief. we've learned a number of lessons about this. versus people want to define critical information through for no technology. we negativ make it up on googles where it's most effective. we have phone numbers and links, our homepage, google map to show

finish from authorities and community, and invite tool so people connect with loved ones in aftermath of the disaster. more and more things the ubiquity of mobile devices. smart phones were able to send users critical information in near real time based on their location and conditions around them. one of our services public alerts compiles and displays authority of emergency information across google properties based on user's location or search query. four days before the sandy storm hit the east coast users who typed in terms like sandy, hurricane, high wind into google search started seeing official national weather service warning paying more information including maps, news, and how to stay safe. recently through a partnership with the national center for missing and exploited children we started publishing amber alerts. when you receive a message on your phone about child missing, ma the first thing you'll do is search for more information to

see if you can help find them. would also build crisis that's what compile information from multiple sources into one single map of people no longer have to search across many websites. following the ultimate tornadoes, i can launch a crisis maps which included red cross shelters, post-disaster and other information. a second lesson that clouds hosting can be enhance the quality of dogmas of critical information. anyone can use google maps and services to create their own maps inescapably. because their open-source anyone can deploy, update and improve our tools. we have learned in some disasters the sources may not have as much information as in from -- individual on the ground do. a group of student volunteers called stations in new jersey to check whether they were open and that gas available. within a few days ahead data for more than 1000 stations. the department of energy into

the referencing this information to a third lesson is critical emergency information to be a fable it should be open an online format so open and secure for much which are open before the death sastre. this is critical. in the past google has to gather emergency information. and translate them into open standards. when google is not an open format many are required to share but each exercise can keep critical information and getting to people in a timely manner. this is why we advocate using an open standards and has a consistent way to receive and share information and great visualization of the content. data providers out the difference automatically a negative online securely within seconds. the government can help by ensuring the information is available and open interoperable formats. we can in the white house for the recent executive order to be

made available. we also welcome steps congress has taken to increase access to government data. we hope the agency with emergency information can adopt these standards as soon as possible. we were able to develop alerts and other new products. we could display more consistent and actionable maps. we can also some specific evacuation structures to different people based on their location. we have a long way to go but we look forward to working alongside emergency or decision and governments to help people find information they're looking for during disasters. thank you to much free time. i'm happy to add to any question you may have. >> thank you, mr. stepka the the chair now recognizes mr. payne for five minutes for opening statement. >> members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. my nana's jason payne and i

jason payne and i leave for planting in jenin team at palantir technologies. palantir technologies is a silicon valley company. we build data software for the governmental private and public sectors. in the context of emergency preparedness and response and recovery, our technology on laptops and smartphones average is one of the most scarce resources during disaster, information. developer partners get the right physical resources to the right places as soon as possible. up of here's a screenshot of our technology displayed on the 10th of an emergency operation center in oklahoma city. this fusion your senior of public data come of governmental dictum of social did and mobile data allows users to build a common picture to improve the efficacy of response efforts. one of our partners in oklahoma city direct relief as a nonprofit that donates over $300 million of medicine every year. they use information from the

own databases with social data, obligated from fema, dhs, cdc, no and even google food trends. and the context of extreme weather like this knowledge enables direct relief to preposition supplies of medicine at federally qualified health center's before storms hit, analyze real-time weather data during the storm, and donate additional medical supplies where they are needed most in the wake of the storm. another partner is a group of veterans engaged in disaster relief. they use palantir during disaster response but after against any, team rubicon just palantir mobile surfing cleanup over 1000 structures in the rock was. using -- along with public 311 data and given handwritten

request for help collected a church party was several hundred team rubicon members were able to officially harness a report team thousand spontaneous volunteers, which is a tremendous resource that is often an underutilized in disastrous news. those volunteers often joined the social media posts removed sand, salt water and sheet rock from homes damaged by sandy before mold second, thus keeping people in their homes. that large-scale success was possible because social media, the better leadership of team rubicon and a knowledge management that tenet is delivered as a result of her success during hurricane say, palantir has made a commitment to action with the clinton global initiative to scale our cutting edge technology abilities to more disaster focused organizations. part of this commitment is our deployment you see here in oklahoma city with direc directf and commute until people get back on their feet after the devastating tornadoes but most

importantly is using all of this do to build a common picture the loss or positions to better communicate to work efficiently and more effectively helpless on the ground that need it most. we have learned a few important lessons that would like to share with the committee. first, opened it is more important than formal exchange models. in the context of emergency response we believe that holding out for perfect -- we encourage governmental organizations to adopt the silicon valley approach come to put it out in a public available robust standardized, secure them will document interface and let other or decisions come up with ways to leverage that data. we applaud no and the census bureau among others for taking this approach. second, canada included are such a social need are useless without power and connectivity. we encourage the subject to export images solutions to provide deployable screens and 4g networks as well as charging stations. and lastly would like to

highlight the need for more robust conversation about data access, sharing and retention to ensure the privacy and civil liberties of those affected by emergencies and disasters are respected at all times. we believe that sensitive information such as names, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers coming certain medical information should be shared with only those with th with a o know the information within an organization. we've had to thousand of thousands of folks who seek to help those most vulnerable. there also a few bad actors after that seek to profit from those that are vulnerable. technology can make a radical difference to help those with good intentions but also can empower that this would highly recommend we look closely at how data is shared, leveraged and utilized and it sure is used for proper purposes. new techno to enables the new era of disaster response to we're humbled to be a part of the transformation another 40 more work in the future two of

those affected by disaster, get back on their feet. this completes my prepared statement. thank you again for the opportunity to join me here today. >> thank you, mr. pinkerton chair now recognizes mr. beckerman for five minutes for an opening statement. >> chairwoman books, tragedy and the symptoms of the committee, thank you for calling this time hearing. it's a pleasure to appear before you today to discuss how the internet and social media are transone how americans prepare, respond and recover when disasters strike at when disasters strike. my nana's michael beckerman, i'm president and ceo of the internet association, a trade or decision comprised of the world's internet country. today i will just highlight a few examples of my written test with that i submitted for the record. as you can see on the screen, and the rise of social media, crowd sourcing and the sharing economy have revolutionized how interaction our friends, family, fellow citizens and government,

commuting during a disaster is now an interactive conversation. millions of minds converge to solve problems, seek out answers and disseminate vital information to the convergence of social network and mobile has known the old responsibly look out the window. the earthquake in january 2010 served as an example of the opportunity social media and mobile technology provide to support the great work of our disaster response professionals. a few hours after the earthquake, a man who was trapped with 20 of the people under collapsed building in port-au-prince managed to send photographs of the wreckage from his phone to a cousin in chicago. because and then tweeted the photograph to at red cross, and first responders in haiti were able to rescue them. in previous disasters the victims may not have been rescued in time. applying the lessons learned from haiti, a protocol has begun to emerge. facebook's disaster relief page which was great during the haiti

earthquake is now used in time a disaster strikes. the american red cross face but they just over a quarter million people following them to learn about disasters can have and donate both blood and money and get information in real time. beyond the dissemination of disaster information and the nation, the red cross has also stopped a social media command center. this allows them to better serve those who need help, in real-time and despite the public needs. it not only connects people with food, water, shelter, but it also lets provide emotional support when they need it most. when a tornado devastated tuscaloosa in 2011, the local school system went online and posted a request for volunteers to help clean up their school. amazingly, 80 people showed up in less than 30 minutes. this response typifies the unmatched power of social media. you would be hard-pressed to make these phone calls in 30 mins, let alone have an outpouring of 80 people show up that quickly. and just last fall when hurricane sandy ravaged the

coastline of my home state of new jersey, people took to the internet to document their experience. in fact, fema encouraged people to quote let loved ones or your kid by senate text message and updating your social network. in a truly america's story a truly america's sorghum at african sandy, a woman noticed a facebook post showing the badly hit south quayside park and cheney were 93 a grandmother was there, trapped, and she sent a message to the page and as a result of grandmother was evacuated and saved. one of the internet association member companies airbnb spring into action following hurricane as well but as you may know, airbnb is an online marketplace that helps find housing and come addition. with more than 1000 people still homeless a week after steady, airbnb partner with the city of new york to connect those without shelters to people who a texas-based but as you can see on the screen, nearly 1500 airbnb members opened their homes for free to provide

shelter for people in need. and, finally, just last month in oklahoma, so should be supplemented by traditional means spreading the message to take shelter. in the immediate aftermath of the nifty and again and kurds survive is to update their social networks and to let loved ones know their whereabouts for families could be whereabouts for families to bury recommit brousseau schmid has changed the way american citizens respond to tragedy. the city of moore, oklahoma, for example, a see on the screen used its facebook page to inform citizens on ways they could help. social media platforms like flickr and instagram of people from all over the country and all over the world to see both wreckage and hope in real time. cindy's unfiltered images in real-time help tells the story in ways that traditional media never quit. and allows people to feel connected and giving them a greater desire to help. the internet has served as a remarkable tool to save lives to facilitate philanthropic relief efforts and improve disaster

response of this. but there's always work to be done. responded to the challenge will require a collaborative effort among government agencies, first responders, technology companies and the general public. it's our pledge we will do our part we can with our companies to facilitate these conversations between government and technology companies to help harness the power of social media and strengthen our nation's emergency preparedness in the 21st century. thank you. >> thank you. a chair now recognizes mr. cardenas for five minutes for an opening statement. >> jimmy brooks, ranking member payne, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. my name is jorge carden is combined vice president of asset management and centralized services for public service, electric and gas company, which is new jersey's largest utility. best known as pseg. territory includes all of new

jersey major urban is to preserve some to point to make electric customers and 1.8 million gas customers. this really is, come together to give about 70% of the population of new jersey. superstorm sandy hit new jersey hard. it took a 48,000 trees which impacted our distribution system. it destroyed 2400 utility poles t,many of them were snapped like to fix. drove water into 29th of our switching and substations. and damaged our gas lines in meters. over or thousand of our gas customers were impacted and almost 2 million of our electric customers lost power. restoration efforts were impeded by a northeastern that hit a weekly. the impacts of the to structure a complexity work to restore service miscommunications of all kinds a key component of the sandy recovery effort. before discuss our social media experience let me also note the

importance of smart grid technology, which enables utilities to obtain critical information that can help pin point problems and automate restoration, smart grid technology enhances our ability to communicate with our own system. i can dramatically shorten the time it takes to restore service in the aftermath of the storm. it can prevent outages from becoming widespread. that's what he new jersey we proposed 450 million investment in smart grid technology as part of our energy proposal. which will harden our system against these types of extraordinary weather events, those would expect over the recent death. turning to social media, we use e-mail and twitter the days before the storm take you make it about safety and health people prepare. after the storm best we use them to explain the historic amount of damage and the huge effort it would take to rebuild. we used twitter to advise on a daily location of our generators

which allowed customers to charge electronic equipment, get free ice, water and the. food. we explained the importance of reporting outages and damaged equipment, and the correct method to do so, so we can take action. we educate the public about what we were doing to get power to refiners, hospitals, schools, businesses and homes. while we have historically a social media only during business hours and with a small group of employees, we quickly staffed up for 17 days operator are twitter feed 15 hours a day, seven days a week. we sent more than 9000 messages and saw some 90,000 directed at us. at one point during the storm we sent so many tweets that we exceeded our daily allowances. for our utility context we reached the leadership of twitter to expand our capacity. that is a lesson learned for the next storm. ultimately, we added over 47,000

followers during the time of the storm. when we exited the storm we had the largest following of the utility in the united states. our innovative use of social media has been noticed outside the company. in a recent report, jd power and associates cited are industry-leading success. following say, the utility customer service nonprofit cs week gave pse&g an award for our use of social media during the storm. here are some of our key takeaways, lessons learned. mobile technology is a game changer. more than half of americans have a smart phone, and more and more people in almost every age demographic are active on so so me. people have been increasing and insatiable need to be connected. even more so in times of emergency. they want to be heard. they want to be validated. they want to help and influences. a number of people on social media spikes in times of

disaster. people flock to twitter and facebook and the like because they're searching for immediate information that they can't get the traditional broadcast channels. engaging influencers is critical. it's just as important a good influence of your online community as it is to grow the size. connecting with people of credibility in the local communities is critical to an organization's ability to spread its message. the public respect and rewards consistent, transparent interaction and cooperation between the private sector and community leaders. during sandy, we used twitter to end with the messages from municipal and state officials, police departments, offices of emergency management, and social service agencies, helping get valuable information right away to those who needed it. tone matters. it does matter a lot. people respect the social media efforts that it continuously is

empathetic, authentic and helpful. public note of appreciation matter, too, especially to the fiercely proud people who work in the utility industry. we regard ourselves as first responders and supported messages can go a long way with every employee base india of a boost. imposing, said he had no, hit home how important it is to concede to improve our ability to communicate and in an increasing 24/7 connected and cyber savvy world. to that and i want to thank congressman payne for working with us on a national research council study that will help our industry use digital information to improve reliability and resiliency, and help us understand our vulnerabilities to cyber attack. thank you again for the opportunity to share our experience. >> thank you, mr. gardena stick before he began to ask questions and for the rest of the penalty against us questions, i would

like to mention that in the spirit of this hearing last week i, as well as some members of my team and staff from homeland security participated in last friday's weekly, social media emergency management chat on twitter. and solicited questions from those participants on a weekly basis, folks producer in this manga and appreciate all the wonderful insights. i'm not sure if this is been done in congress before to solicit these types of questions, but since is -- but since this is that people saw i'm happy to be submitting some of these questions that came from this chat last front of the i should also note that during a chat i was asked to express their appreciation for the work that your companies and your associations are doing to support emergency managers. they wanted to make sure that we think the private sector for all of the work they're doing to

support their work. i would like to start out, first of all, with mr. stepka. thank you for sticking with us today. and certainly i know, and you've shared with us all the positive things that google is doing to assist with survivors and responders. but i'm very curious as to what kind of feedback you have received particularly from the users of your product, whether it's crisis maps, people find, public alert, what kind of changes have you made? because this is obviously an evolving process, and i'm curious what you've heard spent not sure. wendie malick at our feedback is just how many things are being used to we had over 15 million visits to the sandy pages alone. we had a millions of people using our products in this context. i think one of the key areas we looked at, outsourcing and how that became important to add to

crisis maps to realize that information is necessary. sometimes the authoritative source on that could have everything you need to know. >> can you just explain to us, for the audience, what a crowd sourcing is be kosher, crowd sourcing is basically taking data from other databases like from fema or other organizations that have information from those sources which are authoritative, we also have crowd sourcing is collecting data from our users directly and find a way to put that on your properties are on our products. an example i gave was round fuel stations in new jersey. that information came from use and then was put on our website, on our maps of people could see where the stations work that had fuel. the advantage of crowd sourcing is that let lots of people on the ground because they've and provides information, and you have to have a way to do this is good feedback and people can

correct it did they find errors. is a crowd effort to make sure data is accurate spent thank you. just to follow up with respect your method under your seat information, data from multiple sources like you said, you know, red cross and others. have you experienced commend you mentioned in your testimony can you express interoperability issues with importing that information onto your maps? how does that work and what are you doing to address those issues, or what should groups like fema and red cross to help to be talking to in the next panel discussion, you know, what shouldn't we be sharing with them? >> yes, but over the years, there was a lot of work initially. it was all very ad hoc because just want to get the information as quickly as possible. it did slow things down quite a bit. were looking a lot to get did in, that's most important think in ways we can actually treat the date an integrated.

we think the open standard is the best way to do it. not just a google but anyone who can use that information in a secure way. selecting the most important thing, and what i would suggest is that we have the standards and workstations get behind like, for example, for a large we have a standard called comment a large protocol which is being adopted by a lot of organizations. i know in particular usgs is doing earthquakes for example. as much a spot in information in these data formats so that the easy for us to integrate. it's not a problem for us to integrate all the data. >> how might you suggest that we educate everyone about the need for the open format? >> i think it will come up in terms of funding, resources make sure resources are focusing on writing stint but it doesn't require a organization, government workstations tae date

effort to change it so it can be made available to the secure particles but i think that requires some resources. >> thank you. very briefly, mr. penn, the work you are doing of course support the disaster relief efforts to impress. i would like to ask a similar question. as a result of lessons learned from hurricane sandy, what are some of those lessons? i know you sare of those with us, but with respect to the users of your technology. >> i think that one of the first and most important lessons learned is a value of connectivity. what we saw in hurricane sandy is if you looked at open 31 1b which is a great example of governments embracing opened it and pushing out non-urgent request for help from the kennedy, to make it a public available. before hurricane sandy you saw something that reflected the heat map the on didn't

-- afterwards there were discrete areas were completely gone from requests for help because they've lost connectivity. so the first lesson is the absolute importance of empowering people to have ways to share that message, to communicate directly with individuals. the other day a car battery will power an iphone or an android about 150 times. but how do you make that link up such that that device states hot or active in days after storm? so that's one lesson. that being said, technology can be used to work in areas where there's not that connectivity. the second lesson is, the more data that you can fuse, the better cohesive picture you can build. and here, one of the great things that happened after hurricane sandy is noaa release very good high resolution areas.

so in tools like google maps or palantir, we are able to look at where they would stand industries, where they were broken down cars, where they were destroyed buildings, et cetera come and use that to allocate resources to help those people affected by that, get back on their feet. >> thank you very much. my time is now a. i never recognize ranking of the subcommittee, a gentleman from new jersey, mr. penn, for any questions. >> thank you, madam chair. mr. cardenas, most utility companies have a presence on social media but psg and has been a trailblazer in that regard. what differentiates public services, social media efforts from others in the utility industry?

>> i think the key differentiator is that we had real people speaking with real people. our employees live in our service territory. they were experiencing the same exact things our customers were. we were very transparent. our people on twitter have the latest information. they knew about our challenges. they knew about timelines to restore certain communities. they did the best they could up front when we had individual responses. later on they turned to more geographically encompassing messages. we were a pathetic, i think. we were very well connected to each of those who send us a tweet, and we that are very, very best to get timely, very real information out to the public. >> have government entities responsible for disaster relief reached out to pse&g to ask their expertise in developing these best practices?

>> we have, as of late as yesterday, we had a meeting with a number of other utility and other entities to share amongst us our best practices and our successes. both in government. throughout the storm, whether it be a municipal mayors, whether it be the governor's office, the congressman's offices, we work only with him all the time to get their messages and our messages out to ensure we reinforce each other to make sure people are well-informed. >> thank you, sir. and transform, unicode -- and mr. stepka, i represent the to the district in new jersey which was greatly impacted by hurricane sandy hair understand you're a strong presence in the area. would you elaborate on what you did with the state and for the residents of new jersey? >> sure. i think the most relevant thing we did was we gave people on warning about where the map,

with his storm was moving and now it was going. things like that, shelter information. i think the issue about the gas station is what i think was also integers as well. probably one of the responses we did the we worked through tools to provide people with information. >> what can we do in the region to prepare for the next crisis? >> i think the lesson learned about getting paid in advance is available, i think it's important. for more information we can get, i think what's interesting about the fuel information, the longer-term time to recover from the storm damaged important to figure out ways to get the data in advance. i think at the same time we have to find the right balance of getting good information and make sure it is accurate. >> thank you. mr. beckerman, how do you feel,

how can the federal, state and local governments and first responders best leverage the social media and data integration, the tools available on the internet in disaster preparedness and response activities known for? >> one of the most important things is having an open line of communications director technology covers and the government and that appears to be happening. social media and the internet can help before a storm like we've seen in the hurricanes and tornadoes when you have some advanced warning you can send messages out on social media let people know there's a shelter in place or evacuate during a disaster, as we've seen with responding to people to get real-time help. then and after disaster to make sure that relief and volunteers and money and blood and things like that are getting to commit that need it most spent this should be an ongoing conversation. >> absolutely. >> waiting for the next disaster to happen, correct?

>> correct. >> let's see, mr. payne, you've identified development of clear data retention policies as a means of preventing sensitive information for falling into the wrong hands and bad actors. how do you envision these policies being developed? and should they be directed or voluntary? >> in some cases they will be a directive. obviously, personal information about sums health information or health status is a very good that example that falls under the hipaa law. the important thing is in or decision does not know what's happening to the data that they are sharing. them and making a to share that data becomes a very difficult decision to make. if it's an all or nothing far to often that the answer has to be nothing except if there is

ability to technologically tried subsets of data or no personally identifiable information, et cetera, that can empower the organization or that individual to make this decision. at the end of the day those most vulnerable during disaster are those most normal before the disaster. and often it's a systemic health concerns and that sort of thing. knowing who those people are and where they are can be very useful for first responders to ensure that have the correct medication, the correct resources that they need, but redacting that information or moving that information after the disaster is something that i think would make it much more likely for the decision to be yes to share that information. >> madam chair, i yield back. >> thank you very much. the chair when i recognize other members of the subcommittee for questions they may wish to ask the witness. and in accordance with the commit rules and practice lady beckett is members who were present at the start of the inning by seniority in the subcommittee and those coming in later will be recognized in the

order of their arrival. and at this time the chair now recognizes the gentleman from new york, mr. king, former chair of the homeland security committee for questions. >> thank you, madam chair. let me thank you for holding this hearing which is especially vital and it certainly has a real significance coming so soon after cindy. and let me join mr. payne in committee, the outstanding job turn 11 did in new jersey. in my district, we have about $8 billion in damage. and that we can cope with their but we cannot cope with was almost totally lacking indication between the consumers and the public utility, long island power authority. it was can almost impossible to information and get answers. again i said almost a total breakdown in communication. from what mr. payne has said and

certainly in your test was today it's clear pse&g was making substantial use of social media. and i know you work with in new jersey but are you making any effort to reach beyond new jersey to share your experience with other utilities throughout the country? >> absolutely. we have met with con edison, with a lighter, with members from connecticut to share our best practices. we have shown them what we did, how would able to in real-time ramp up, train our employees to respond on twitter. it's become a brand-new technology that grows every day, changes everyday pics i have to stay ahead and we chose to embrace it and to be very transparent but i think that's the one thing we talked the other utilities, please provide information you have and that's important and that it be done with people who can speak with

people, not two people. because everybody is kind of in the same boat and we're all trying to help each other. so we have met with utilities in the surrounding states. >> can you tell us if you have been listening to you? >> only time will tell. and i'm sure there will. i think the energy industry, the utilities, tend to share information good wages so that everybody takes it on in a very timely manner. >> thank you, mr. cardenas. once again mr. payne is ahead of us. we in new york are trying to catch up, but anyway. thank you for bringing the witness today. let me ask mr. stepka, but i guess expanding on your testimony with the chairwoman, and you describe the partnership that you establish with first responders and government agencies as google grows -- rolls out its crisis efforts? again, if you emphasize what you

do with sin and how that would apply to the future of? >> sure. i think it's a key partner we work with, i think they shelter information. with the city of new york were very engaged as well. we created a separate map in your. with special day that was a fable to them for evacuation route and things like that, affected areas. of course, we work with noaa for weather information to the also working with the cap standard for alerts. it's very helpful for light wind storms are coming and to get that information to users but with sandy those partnerships, we were able to respond more effectively. ..

the new yorker has concerned me is the way that the mobile phone scenario signal degrades rapidly in that environment. you couple that with a water event so that perhaps mr. payne's idea of using a car battery becomes a nonstarter. and then the going down of the

grid. now, you know, we have no way of communicating, and so i'd be interested in sort of getting a sense of other ways that we can tap into the technology world beyond the affected environment, to bring relief as rapidly as possible to those environments. has there been any discussion about satellite technology, and how that in some way can be of assistance? and then finally, just a description of your partnership with new york responders and agencies around such an event. i spoke about a natural disaster, but in the event of a terrorist attack, which we have experienced in new york city, the same scenario plays out once

everyone starts getting on their mobile phones at the same time. it becomes a -- if you can get through to someone you're lucky. and it seems to go in circles. the closer you are, the harder it is. but after a while, there's a cascading effect. that was a major concern for many days after the event in new york city. >> a question about the use of mobile phones during a crisis. it is a problem -- first you need to have very -- ideas about getting around the issue. they're on different grids. own power sources. you mention the idea of satellite and other technology. something we have done a lot of internal discussions around, useful as a backup situation in these situations. a lot of advantages and

disadvantages we can look into more deeply in making investments overall, but we don't have anything in place. i think we are focusing more leadly on, more cost effective, and that is getting people more prepared before hand. so a storm like sandy, you can see it coming. unlike a tornado which gives very little warning. but when you know it's coming you i can give people instructions and ideas how to prepare for so they don't have to deal with evacuating or getting supplies ready for emergencies. we can do a better job at and something we're looking at closely. the second question is more around terrorist attacks. mostly focusing on natural disasters. in a terror attack, we helped in the boston bombing. we turned on our person finder so people could find out where

their loved ones were during the crisis. i think a different set of issues and should locked at carefully. a bad actor is in play and how they're engaging in this event and see how we respond. >> there exists a system for ngos to use voice, called the wireless priority service, that is over a decade old and doesn't have any allocations for data. to change that to allow folks to use data would reduce the congestion on networks and allow people to be more effective in communicating. furthermore, the first net initiative, looking long-term is something that can help. a nationwide 500 mega hurst

worth of spectrum allocation for data transmission during emergency response. my understanding now that's only for official government agencies. if there could be small portions of that first net system that could be allocated for individuals at fema shelters or red kraus shelters or ngos to do quick communications and check in with lovedded ones that would go a long ways to help people communicate in wide-scale disasters. >> thank you very much, madam chair. >> the chair now recognizes the gentleman from pennsylvania, mr. perry, for five minutes. >> thank you, madam charity. gentlemen, i appreciate your testimony. i'm interested in prevention of things that we have seen happen and wondering what you see is the federal government's role, particularly in cases -- if we

can use the boston bombing at the marathon and the facebook postings in advance of that. how do you see that should be monitored in the first place? how should it be monitored? what would the triggers be? should that information go to law enforcement? who should send it? i think there's a lot of questions here. i think there's some expectation this stuff is open source, that it no longer bears the same privacy concerns that maybe your e-mail would. once you post on facebook. is that true in and if that is available, should or should we not be using that to savegard our communities? and i'd like to have a continuing dialogue.

they can do that directly. i think the most important thing to think about that. this is a free society. at it hard to figure out how to deal with these kinds of information out there, usually a very small number of people who are bad actors and -- >> from our perspective, privacy is very important. our companies take the privacy issue very seriously, either every day and also during disasters. and there are a lot of tools online but we feel that law enforcement should use the same warrants and due process they do

in the analog world that should be applied in the digital world. >> so in that case, would there have been or were facebook postings -- whose responsibility is to monitor? how would they find in this huge universe of postings, how would they find that in the timely -- whoever they are. who do you see? who are the "they"? law enforcement, department of justice, department of defense? the cia? who is it that would do it, you folks? and how would they go about finding that needle in the hay stack on a continual basis if you have any thoughts. >> one thing we can do is related youtube, when people would post to either -- around hate speech or terrorist activity, we flag that information and we take it down. so we rely on our users to help in that sense. i think, as i mentioned before,

public postings, leave it to law enforcement to look at public postings. they're not public they have to too through to the normal process. >> so when you take it down, it falls within the criteria you find objectionable, do how to then feel an obligation to report in the instance of these facebook postings? should there be an obligation? was there any obligation other than just taking it down? that doesn't help law enforcement. that doesn't alert citizens or the authorities to what might be impending. what is prow protocol or what should to the protocol be there? >> on you tube, user flag for being terrorist activity or bomb-making type thing. we take it down. i don't know whether we do then inform law enforcement of that. i can find out.

>> thank you. madam chair, i yield back. >> thank you. i recognize the gentleman from mississippi. >> thank you, madam chair, and thank you to the witnesses. i represent the mississippi's fourth congress aal district, -- congressional district that spans the coast. we got hit by hurricane katrina, almost eight years ago. feels like a very long time, but the remnants of the storm are still everly present with us ever day and we're still recovering. i would like point out facebook was in its infancy, almost nonexistent to many people. twitter was nonexistent. the first alpha wouldn't come out for another year. last year, hurricane sandy hit the northeast and there were millions of people on social media, sharing information, checking up on loved ones. so, just in a few short years we

have seen social media explode. i think most of my questions have already been answered. we talked about lessons learn but if any of you on this panel have the experience, can you compare the technologies we had during hurricane katrina, the lessons we learned that brought us up to the successful information sharing we had during hurricane sandy? and mr. stepka, just go left to right. >> sure. i think the biggest change would be mobile phone technology, major change, when people have access to communications, especially wherever they are and if their main lines go down. the second question of social media. i think people are more connected and have many outlets and ways of contacting both authoritative organizations as well as each other so they can tell family members they're okay, that sort of thing. >> i believe on the biggest difference that social media has provided is the efficiency of

the supply and demand of those that want to help and those that need help. what we saw with hurricane sandy, we had one group of veterans, a couple hundred people in total, that harnessed over 14,000 volunteers from the community, and the volunteers, by fusing tech non, requests for help, were officially tasked to remove sand from parking lots and playgrounds, et cetera, and that the next effect being very quickly after the disaster, both houses had the material removed that prevented mold from growing in the houses and the houses being destroyed. so looking ahead, i believe we'll see an ever-increased ability to harness more good will and more help from individuals in the surrounding areas to help people get back on their feet and that's the best use of social media. >> i think you explained the differences perfectly by the

fact that facebook had been only a year in existence, twitter didn't excess no iphones. so during hurricane katrina in 2005 only half of internet users used online sources sources to s and today that's much higher. only 25% used online sources to check in on loved ones and let people know they were all right, and today we heard from the rest of the panel and the members that the number is much higher. after hurricane katrina, 13 million people went online in the united states to donate, and again, that's higher. so, we've seen the technology has grown, the billion fits of the -- benefits and social media helped people and a benefit during hurricane katrina as well. >> well, i definitely agree with everything you have said. i can tell you just the other day, we had a severe weather event and my phone went off and i didn't -- i didn't apply for the app. the phone service notifying us we're about to hit some severe

weather on the mississippi gulf coast and i was grateful for that. as we have seen in tornadoes that have recently happened and tornadoes in my district and across the country, it does allow people from all across the united states to help in some form or fashion, even if it's donations or having people come out and help fell sandbags, remove mold. my final question would be what's suggestions or tip does you have for americans, actually users of the technology so the media, during a disaster? >> what types would you provide? >> i think the first tip, have a plan in advance of an emergency. every family should be thinking about this. they should know how to contact each other. whatever means they want to do it, whether electronic. so preparation is important. and power is essential. think about water and other resources to have ready,; and

having power so you can access communications. >> don't take for granted we know that you don't have power. so, it's good to know that information because maybe two blocks from you people may not have power, you may get power, they don't have power. so, please, be accurate. you don't have power, let us know, because it may be that you have a problem that is only localized to your block or your service. so provide information. the more the better. >> thank you, madam chair. a very informative hearing. >> thank you. i have a couple of questions, kind of following up on that a little bit. how can our emergency management officials monitor and validate the information that they receive, or the power companies, how can you -- do you monitor and validate?

we learned on twitter last week that officials shared with us, how can the private sector help the emergency managers and first responders efficiently collect, validate, share this information, posted by a public during a disaster? any suggestions as to how your experiences and working inform and i guess i'll start with mr. cardenas. >> right now, real-time, we have people on twitter, on facebook, and information that is posted is shared not only with us but back with municipal officials, state officials, and i think that's critical, to have that partnership between the public and the private sector. and that it is a two-way street. they come to us with information, we good to them. during events, many times there's false information posted and working with that municipal official you can correct the information. you can provide -- it's not going to be out three weeks.

it may be three days. and that kind of sets people to be on the right page after what they have to plan for. and many of these events are real-time. so, that real-time information is critical. >> mr. stepka. >> i think that important to look at the information as being imperfect in a crisis and evolve. i think collaborating among agencies and organizations is critical, as well as the public. the public can help validate information. i think the crowd sourcing idea makes sense in this context. we have to think about where it's appropriate and how to act on it, when we need to validate the information before you act on it. corroborate the information elsewhere. >> there truly is a risk of data obesity as we go with information streams and i think that robust data fusion capabilities with data analysis capabilities can empower that

analyst to two through the information that is relevant to them against other sources and use social media as part of the wholistic approach to information, to make resource allocation decisions. >> with respect to the work that you have all been doing, just last week fema released 2013 national pred preparedness report which identified the need to mature the role of public-private partnership as an area for improvement, and this was highlighted during or twittest chat last week, and based on the incredible work your companies are doing, what has your actual interaction been with federal, state, and local governments, and has fema reached out to you all specifically and have you worked with fema and i'll ask mr. stepka and paine specifically initially.

i'm sure you have work with them, mr. cardenas. >> worked with fem ma and talk to them about how to we can better work together to support their efforts. i think ought to do that more as well. i think at every level of government we have been working with different situations. we worked with the city of new york as well in a crisis. i think we look for scalable ways to reach out to organizations. it's hard to reach out to all of them so it's important, if we have standards laid out and doesn't require we have a relationship with every single organization and every level of government, interaction with secure data will take care orthos interactions. >> i think the relationship highlights the importance of open data. fema does a great job with information that can be made available so we can leverage that information. certainly welcome the opportunity to engage them to

see how on both sides how to improve that relationship. we -- during hurricane sandy we did work with the office of executive management at new york city. they did a fantastic job in a face of dozens of organizations to help as much as possible, and i think that was a success story of a governmental social sector interaction. and it's something that we take a very strong commitment to open up technologies, and with all the work we have done, via flood, tornado, hurricane, ensure that al the data generated by mobile devices was made available to relevant authorities to make sure they had access to the information, other than person personally identifying information that was removed. >> thank you. i would ask the ranking member, gentleman from new jersey, for any further questions? >> yes, ma'am. thank you, madam chair.

mr. cardenas, i have a real great interest in smart group technology and have had conversations with your company officials as well in reference -- and in your testimony you explain that smart group technology enables companies to pinpoint problems and restore service more quickly. how does the smart grid technology differ from 20th 20th century technology? >> well, equipment in a smart network, in talks to the components of that system. it can reconfigure automatically the way a neighborhood is fed. it relies not on human beings doing individual steps. information between these components can automatically restore services in many case, and in addition to that, it provides efficiencies with the

setting up of a circuit you're going to work on. so that you don't have to send people to each piece of equipment, and put it in a way that people can work on it. for instance, we have 4,000 people who came to help us out, and we had to, eave morning, send them out to do work. it took us a long time to allow them to be able to do the work because we had to make it safe. with a smart grid, with a supervisory control and information system, we could do that remotely and gain efficiencies and the actual time and leveraging that resource to get the restoration done. so a smart grid is quantum leaps ahead of what we had ten years ago, 20 years ago. it's now the way we go and it's where we are hoping to make very large investments in. >> so, that's basically how the smart grid technology would improve responses during

disasters. >> both ways. it will dive with efficiency of the people working to restore service as well as the automated restoration associated with reconfiguring the way the grid is fed. >> thank you. and mr. stepka in your testimony, you note that affordable high speed internet access is necessary to be tech-ready for disasters. nearly 100 million americans do not have access to broadband, and a third do not have access to internet, and i discussed that a bit yesterday when we were in my office. so from your perspective, how does the digital divide undermine disaster response and how would you address the problem? >> i think the big important issue, in addition to crisis response, we also look to the issue in general, trying to provide better internet access

to people around the world. we have launched an effort to bring high-speed internet starting in kansas city, austin, and provo, and that is -- in general this is very important. obviously we need have a way to provide internet access to everybody as well as high-speed access in homes. i think whoever has access to these great tools have advantage of being connected, not just in a crisis. think it's a challenge which we're doing in general, and focusing our resources on. a couple of challenges in urban environments versus rural environments. rural environments are very hard to reach using fiber, for example, and usually our wireless technology is more efficient. so we have experimented with can with the fcc on a different technology which provides potentially access to people using the tv white spaces, which is a growth of bandwidth that

can be used to contact a person rurally. >> madam chair, i yield back the balance, and like to thank all the witnesses for their testimony. >> thank you. i have a question of mr. beckham and start with you, and others might want to chime in. what are -- in following up, what are some things the federal government should do in forming partnerships with the private sector to take advantage of the new technologies? i might ask whether or not you're aware -- you represent a number of associations -- i'm sorry -- a number of companies and incredibly innovative companies. any new technologies we can anticipate that can be used that you can talk with us with respect to social media for emergency and disasters? how can we better connect up the federal government with these new technologies?

>> well, i'd say this hearing today is a great start. opening the dialogue, so thank you for having the hearing. the most important thing is for private sector, companies in the federal government, to have an open die explosion talk. the technology is evolving, and as we good through each one of these unfortunate situations lesson are learn and the federal government gets better and the public gets a better understanding how to use the technology. crowd sourcing is a very powerful tool, both during a disaster to help bring volunteers and after disaster to help bring money and volunteers and rebuild. so we just ask that the federal government -- they've been doing a great job so far -- keep an open dialogue with our companies and shear data -- share data where they and can educate the public how to use this technology. >> do you believe the federal government is improving its you of social media for emergency alerts and preparedness? what is your opinion on that?

>> absolutely. improving everytime, and as we have seen from protocols from fema, they're using social media to send out alerts to either sheller in place or evacuate, and that's great step. >> any other on the panel who would like to comment on about how we work even better together and any emerging technologies? >> i echo everything said. it's helpful to work collaboratively on these ideas. the technology is evolving. working together on open formats for dat to be shared in a secure way that is appropriate, using crowd sourcing as well is very important in this context. the white house recently on data standards and i think moving in the right direction. >> mr. payne? >> to echo the other panelists, i concur we are moving in the right direction.

i'm heartened by many of the open data initiatives and open data standards. the white house cpo has done a fantastic job pushing new standards and making computer comprehensible format the norm. one good example is nonprofit data. today nonprofit data is publicly available, but as a scanned's of paper the computer cannot read very well, and it takes hundreds of thousands of man hours to rewrite the addiction rewrite the database and the put proposal is for that to be electronic information and thus much, much easier for technology organizations to leverage that data. 1.4 million nonprofit organizations in america today, and having the ability to engage them in a disaster on an emergency would have a lot of benefit to those on the ground

and open data could go a long way towards that engagement. >> thank you. mr. cardenas? >> i'll give you one example of the collaboration and how we're going to be able to help. in ther in very distant future i can see a fir responder from a municipality going out with a phone, taking a picture, sending that to us. it can tell us what equipment is at that location the picture was taken from, and then take action on that. the collaboration between the utility and the way it formats its information, the ability to speak and connect with that device, will be critical as we move forward into the future where, whether be crowd sourcing or just they of these devices to locate and identify equipment damaged is going to continue to be critical. that i'm hoping i'll be able to see in the next nine to 12 months. >> thank you. thank you very much.

mr. payne? >> madam chair, i ask unanimous consent to commit testimony from humanity road and the business emergency operations center alliance of new jersey for the record. >> thank you. without objection, that will be admitted. at this time, i would like to ask mr. payne if he has anything for closing he would like to say before i close out? okay. thank you very much. i would very much like to thank this panel for their very valuable testimony. i think we have learn a lot. we started a very important discussion. what i think is happening with emergency managers, with -- whether it's municipal or state or federal officials, your companies are paving the way. you have created new technologies. i'm looking at the back of this actual hearing room is a picture from