People of IOG: Dr. Mihaela Ulieru

and we're live hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado i'm joined today with one of my favorite people mahala she has been working with iog for a while and is just a thoroughly interesting person and this is part of a new series a new effort about a week ago i was doing an ama and one of the comments is why is it always charles why is it always charles and that's a good point the reality is my company is more than 300 people and each and every one of them special in their own way so i decided to create a series where every week or a few weeks i bring on one of the people that work with us and they get to tell their story and where they come from what they do and how they're changing the world in their own little way so without further ado mahela why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and tell a little bit about your background and where you come from thank you charles first of all for this opportunity i just want to say that probably and i know i compete with everyone who is listening now but i think i'm your greatest fan enough of that this is your show so come on tell us a little bit about where you came i really want to listen to you all the time and it's just so fascinating to to listen to you i want to tell you that i really feel honored for this opportunity and so i don't know where to start start with romania where'd you come from so so yeah so my name is mikhaila ulyer which is very romanian i mean that's why i think it starts with that and most people call me dr m for this reason because it's not very easy to pronounce it anyway i yes i was born in romania and i lived in a totally different system than it is today in romania and as well here in the us obviously for many years and this has shaped first of all my drive for for the work which i'm doing here and and really also the fact that i am appreciating and what you do hang on hang on so let's start with romania so what was romania like when you lived there and you were born what was the system and this is indeed it is very emotional for me to go back there so i do not know if your audience is familiar with the caricature in which it shows you have the hammer which levels someone who stands out of the crowd and it's a hammer from this from the communist flag and so this is the environment in which i was born i just ended up there i didn't choose it we don't choose our parents we don't choose where we are born and as such i had to to survive it for many years we didn't know any better because we didn't have except one program on tv in which we could hear for two hours our dictator telling us a lot of things so probably the closest that your audience is familiar with is what you see as images from north korea and this is the reality under which i lived we didn't have even what to eat we didn't have bread i remember staying in long lines at oil and sugar and bread and sometimes i found myself just finding in the fridge because my parents were at work if i was lucky there was some bread in the house and mustards and this is what i was eating so yes it was interesting there's one thing however which i am grateful for having been born there one thing which was valued there was education we didn't have anything we didn't have money everybody was paid a very little amount and all of them the same amount it doesn't matter whatever merit you had but education was a distinctive factor and that's was very helpful obviously for me yeah so let's let's get into that so what was education like in the k-12 in a in a communist country like how did school work when did you go to school when did you leave what did you study these types of things it was first of all it was very disciplined i remember yes i mean they were even beating us yes so i remember if you did something the hand they were hitting you and i just didn't want to feel that pain so everybody was very disciplined as well as homework and a lot of work but we had excellent teachers who really loved their work and i remember that my parents brought me to a school which was a special school in those times in romania with the teaching all the teaching was in italian and and it was a mathematical physics specialization but i had to take three buses and i remember staying on the bus stairs because there were too many people on the bus and i would be late at class and they would punish me if i am late so the buses didn't come it was winter i had to to hang by the stairs and then still i went there but the education wasn't you had to take three buses to get to school three buses so it was like about four hours two hours there two hours back yes on changing three buses and waiting for them in the cold and so on and so forth yes wow so it took four hours one way or four hours both ways or how long it was four hours both ways two hours each way yes and sometimes the bus is broke and you had to go back home by foot so it was but we were young when you were young everything is possible and it's like okay that's all we didn't have anything else to do except homework which we could do on the bus sometimes but the teachers were so dedicated and really i mean if you loved education if you loved learning they were they were extending themselves so how old were you when you were doing this italian mathematical physics program were you like 12 13 or was a little older it was no it was already in third grade so i was nine yes so yes you were nine years old and you had to take three buses by yourself yes wow okay yes that's why i'm so independent i do not know i think me yeah so i made i made it to washington dc come on okay so when in your youth did you discover that you were you had an aptitude for the sciences the mathematical sciences and research and fell in love with the academy what about that was was so appealing to you when did that you wanted to become an academic wow i don't think it until you are one so it's a it's it's a bit of a longer story but i will just give you the short version so i wasn't this this i ended up at a high school of math physics but i was known as a poet so i was on tv as a poet and literary critique and i won many olympics and poetry so in romania i was known also at because of tv and my awards in poetry i was known as a poet and everybody expected i would study literature right and in the last year so my of high school my math teacher was changed and the new teacher came to class and i win the first row there we'll keep looking at everyone and and learning and he looked at me because he knew i was kind of known in my school for my poetry achievements and literature and he looked at me and he brought a book by leibniz i don't know if that book you're a mathematician charles leibniz wrote a motto in that book and if he was talking about one of his former students who became a poet and gave up mathematics and it said oh of course he didn't have enough imagination for mathematics and my teacher my master looked me in the eye when he read that quote and i'm like what do you mean poetry needs more imagination than mathematics and then he said see me after class if you want to understand me and he explained to me that you can prove theorems in many many ways and that there's you really need a lot of imagination for mathematically which the former teacher didn't instill in me i mean for me mathematics was i do not want to say boring but i couldn't see the imaginative creative part of it until that moment and then this teacher trained me and i really i discovered the eureka phenomenon when you really can prove a theorem and the beauty of it how you can encapsulate a phenomenology in a beautiful equation and in that year i trained with him and i won the olympics in mathematics on my school and then i went further to city and on romania and so it changed my life and that's what gave me courage to also study robotics and automation because that was the final year of high school it was very competitive at the time in romania so i went on and studied it was the first year of control engineering in and robotics in in that university the polytechnica bucharest and i remember my mother knowing that i was kind of the poet so now suddenly i want to apply there and there were limited seats i mean you had to really it was very competitive it's not you you pay and you can go and study it was really competitive and i told my mom one place it if it is it will be mine and what was the gender ratio like for the scientists was it mostly men or was it balanced between men and women were you the one girl in the class or how was that that was an excellent question charles and and really he's he's a big point here which i am it surprises me especially now with the international woman day i'm being invited every day to give a talk about women in science and and so on and so forth but there there were more women and and the first in class were always i mean the when you finish valedictorian and so on there were women people say that yeah because they eat books more than men and men like to play more but there was nothing like gender differentiation or so i didn't feel anything like that and yes women were very ambitious and i think given the same opportunities it showed i mean they were doing very well and so the romanian universities also integrated into the soviet system but did the roman universities have connections to moscow and you got to hang out with the russian mathematicians and the the russian physicist or was romania more isolated in the academic world yes and no so when my parents generation they had to learn russian in my generation that the politics has changed and ceausescu if he did one good thing was that he got the americans to be allies and actually protect romania from the soviet bloc and we i learned english in in high school and in school because of this yes so i don't speak russian but for the math olympics because we were in the soviet blog in the communist blog i could only compete with the russians and i can tell you that they are really really good at mathematics yes i think really they are they are they are yes i don't want to say the best because of course i mean those from every country can be really good but but if they are really good at their stuff when it comes to math okay so when was this the 1980s 1990s what what time yes please don't go there you want your audience to really know we're just trying to get a notice of what history are we more bill clinton are we more ronald reagan it was it was before the wall fell which we know it was in 89 right so that's that found me still in romania okay so you did your undergraduate in romania did you also pursue a phd in romania or did you go somewhere else for your phd i could not pursue a phd in romania that's one thing which of course yes that's why i'm the militant that i am as well because i was not involved with the political party there only those were allowed to pursue a phd the dictator's wife was the academician the the president of the romanian academy and as such everybody had to be loyal in order to get a phd so i didn't do that but i started two jobs one they still kept me in university after i graduated so i was teaching in university even without a phd and then i worked in industry so i was working at the biggest research center in computers in romania and they allowed me so that is the beauty of it so the the director of this center really realized what value he has there and so he supported us so i was writing publications and that were accepted internationally and i couldn't they wouldn't allow me to have a passport so i couldn't go to munich for example where we had the international congress of automatic control but when it was in tallinn they allowed me to go but i didn't have the money so that the director of my institute paid for my travel and i remember him really i told you it's emotional this interview because i remember being in his office and he said he's saying yes go and take your chances i mean that was really something that changed my life and i went there in tallinn and italian i met my the the my phd supervisor i i keep i still keep his photo here it just happens to be here professor rolf isermann from darth that he is emeritus now and and he was he chaired my session in tallinn that was my first time out of romania so he shared my session and then he asked me do you want to do a phd with me and i was i just wouldn't even answer and afterwards we communicated with snail mail obviously because the internet was not in romania at the time it probably was nowhere and and i ended up on a dad scholarship because of that conference in in germany doing phd with the most one of the most renowned control engineers what university what university was this in general the technical university of darmstadt okay yes so romania to germany that must have been a hell of a transition i mean did you did you speak german at all i didn't speak german at all and the first after the first months i i remember i went to my my professor and i told him i can learn any languages i can learn c i can learn programming languages i can learn anything in any other language but german so i certainly because the mundi proofing mustaf deutsch sign i have no idea if you have a german audience but in the meantime i learned it but when i heard that i had to give the oral exam of my phd the defense in german yes i think they have a word for that scheizer exactly i had five years to learn it and it is so different from romanian which is similar to italian yes right so so yes and then he he enables me to study at gote institute that's another very nice story very short one if i may i met there my german teacher there she was a an amazing lady and me being born in romania very conservative country by the way and so feminist was not something which we we were even fencing we had no idea what it is it was very judged everybody had to play by the rules and so on and so forth and women stay at their place although we were successful and when when it was about work yes equal and this this german lady she changed my my my life in many ways but because she challenged me with very interesting articles so for example she gave me an article about feminism and she gave me an article in german of course which i had to understand and then translate it by myself another one comparing religions orthodoxies with catholicism and so on and and this opened to me new worlds like completely new words and therefore i could learn german because she made it interesting and i remember at class she came once and we were of course all like german as a second language kind of thing and i made many friends from many countries there but i remember that she came to me and she said you do best in vundaki she said you are a miracle child kind of so i say something once and you remember it immediately for the others i have to say it three times and they don't remember so i remember that but it was not i'm sure it's not because german was easy or because i have some whatever talent it was because it was so interesting i mean how old were you at the time oh well i was in my my late twenties okay and were you living alone or were there any other romanians you were living with or like how isolated were you in germany yes that's another oh my god so when i arrived in the first place yes so it was my scholarship was pretty minimal i mean it was very small yes and they coming from romania but in germany it was quite expensive so i shared my whatever vonnug their apartment with another romanian lady who was actually studying also in darfur luckily but in another department so they coupled us so at the university they enabled us to have this volume i don't know how to call it like housing let's call it housing and i was with her so in terms of isolation i have to tell you one thing so moving from romania to germany in germany i was the first phd student female in that department in the department of this wonderful gentleman professor izerman you can google here so he didn't have any other women students before and and i have to say that i encountered a lot of hostility from my male friends i mean and colleagues not friends i cannot call them friends but maybe later on maybe now i would call them friends so a lot of hostility and they were making a lot of jokes and for example my my topic was diagnosis with fuzzy logic so he wanted professor rizzerman wanted to try something new and said why not give it to the wild card bihala coming from romania because if it doesn't work we can always send her back so i maybe he didn't think so badly but but anyway so i was the only one doing fuzzy control and trying to to control a lot of engines and so on and so forth with fuzzy logic versus normal pid control okay so let's talk about that so first off control theory i mean you could have done many things you could have done become an algebraic or you could have become a physicist or done computer science a phd there so what is control theory and and what is what exactly did you study in control theory for our audience that's not familiar with the topic yes so control theory is like maybe maybe more familiar your audience is with this concept of cybernetics so control theory is an application or terrestrial application of cybernetics in which you have a system a system has an input and an output and then in order to control it you make a loop which is called the feedback loop from the output to the input and that is the magic thing in which you can actually control the output by knowing if it goes up or down because you have this feedback which goes back in the input and depending on what you put inside your controller which is another system in parallel with the system which you want to control which also takes the same input and that feedback from the output then you can regulate your system in order to perform like when you for example open the warm hot water it's a shower right so that is a very nice if you have a delay yes so then that you that is when you when you feel this proportional derivative control switch because if you have too hot water then you have to control it to make it a bit less hot and that is all can be achieved automatically if you set a thermometer it can be achieved automatically you do not have to to do that manipulation by hand so anyway what brought me there is a different story and that is captain kirk so so star trek because i wanted to study anything about robotics and you need control engineering for robotics so they are kind of the same manufacturing would it be fair to say something a robot walking would be a control problem because it has to adjust itself for balance and figure out how to stand up right with that that is a very complex control problem yes but a pendulum is a it's a difficult enough one as well that's also so so how do you adjust a pendulum yes that's also a control problem right or or a a drone that wants to stay stable in the air somehow and it's it's kind of as an autonomous car for that matter that is a definitely a control problem we are all control engineers when we steer a car that is actually steering is controlled so those techniques we use today are mostly ai driven but i imagine in the 1980s maybe there was a different paradigm so what were you guys doing in the 1980s for i did a proportional integral derivative so it was like very simple equations of control these are the basics the fundamentals of control and then when you say with ai that's why he got me in his group to do fuzzy control that is fuzzy logic is artificial intelligence but it is a bit more complex because ai works with zero one logic fuzzy logic is an infinity of logic so this is between zero and one so you cannot you you can you you take in between point five point three point two on how you define your variables so you can define them with more relaxed and more relaxed terms not only 0 1 i mean let's say and life is like that yes so it's not what means far what means me or what means too close so and then i have to pray to press the break with what strength do i press the break and again other many many other things can be defined more relaxed with fuzzy logic so between zero and one but anyway so so yes artificial intelligence means a lot of things it depends on the degree of intelligence right so it's we used in zen as well okay so you're sitting in germany you're learning how to speak german you're somewhat isolated but gradually building a network there and you're learning about control and a field that now today we all get it super important probably in the 1980s male colleagues i have to say that they don't hear it but but of course it mattered to me speaking of being isolated yeah so yeah yeah the first woman and you're the romanian girl amongst germans who are already pretty pretty german focused that's probably as close to as isolated as you can get and you're having to learn about fuzzy logic so you go from bullying land to fuzzy land and i imagine the mathematics were were quite elegant and complex that yeah and they were saying and making jokes of course that yeah i mean normal logic we understand as german guys but right fuzzy logic it's for a romanian woman things like this i had to digest so as you're getting closer to that legendary dissertation you're actually going to write the paper that gets you the phd how did you pick a topic what what really excited you like what did you want to solve what was your problem so i always was was very passionate also in my master's actually i did the diagnosis so i i am very passionate in general about diagnosing systems but systems at any scale you can start with as you say a robot a car or something but when you come to higher systems societies and so on and so forth it's the same process so you look at the system and if it functions correctly and if not are there any causes which you can detect and if you detect whatever you detect are the symptoms but can you actually infer the why from the what and the what are the symptoms so this is something which fascinated me and as such fuzzy logic enabled me because for diagnosis symptoms are not always very crisp yeah they can be i have high temperature or what is that i have a headache how do you quantify that and as such this is i i studied i went towards diagnosis with fuzzy logic this is what i wanted to to achieve and to to create a theory about that and all what we knew was the world by pearl judea pearl which was he he's a big probabilistic guy and he wrote the probabilistic reasoning so he wrote this this the bible on how to to do diagnosis or anything with probabilities and i had to challenge that in my thesis and that is this title was diagnosis with fuzzy logic possibilistic networks and obviously coming from a woman and possibilistic and what is that what is this buzzword and so on and so forth so i had to to encounter i encountered a lot of resistance as well but i also have to say that i was very lucky and again referring to my my mentor and phd supervisor but i was also very lucky because in the first year of my phd at the first conference i met the founder of fuzzy logic professor lot fizzade he he i can say now the late professor he passed away a few years ago but he was my mentor since i met him and i remember and you took me by surprise i would have had this because i'm very proud of that after i met him he wrote me a letter and in that letter he said it's very emotional but but he said i predict a bright future for you you combine passion with high interest in science and the charming personality i remember those words and then he said i predict the bright future for you i have that letter i keep it it's like a treasure for me i just couldn't believe when i when i received it and and i decided to not disappoint him so he supported me also of course a lot through my career because at the phd exam you have to have supporters otherwise and especially when you when you come up with a new theory and with something which is absolutely novel like this possibilistic network nobody heard of them and especially with with having pearl which is an amazing and eminent scientist and mathematician postulating that probabilities are it and zade and pearl were fighting with each other anyway i ended up in the middle of that but the first thing which professor zade taught me when he met me he said one thing which you should always remember is remember to grow a sick skin if you want to make it in academia i remember that really i remembered all my life and so he said if someone criticizes you or is nasty or toxic with you just respond and remember this word i take it as a compliment and he said take it as a compliment because ignorance is what you don't want if you are criticized it means it is a compliment in academia so so yes it was it was interesting an interesting ride there and i feel so fortunate also because of the support so of course there were obstacles but also a lot of support so you went from romania where you'd never left the country kind of living in one unified culture thinking you're going to be a poet getting challenging goated and becoming a creative mathematician and then somehow ending up in control theory land by serendipity and can i say one first thing but but okay ask me but i just have to say one thing because you brought me from romania to germany and one thing i have to tell you whenever i was flying from bucharest to frankfurt because that's what i had to do in one hour that was for me the hour from hell to heaven and back the same from heaven to hell it's very emotional but it is true it was why do you take me back again to romania but it it was like that yes i mean really and so you're now in germany you're starting to find yourself you're meeting these legendary theorists who have created the domains they're going to ask me at once and write me letters and now and so what was what was defending your dissertation you had to present it i guess in german and was it a very harsh process it was i do not know how to say harsh process i think every dissertation defense is is a a very tough process i mean you are pushed you have to be pushed what what we have to do and now i'm a professor and of course i'm doing it to others but what we have to prove is so first of all we have to be pushed beyond our limits i mean just for them to find out how much where did you get and how much can you defense or maybe go forward so this is what they did and of course doing it in in german was more difficult i would have been of course much much better in in romanian of course in english i do not know at that time i lived in germany but i was i remember i was very afraid i think every every i was emotional and of course i was uneasy but and and they pushed me to the limit but i remember at the end my not my supervisor but it was one of the examiners and he came to me and he said because of how i presented and so on so he said i think i will give you also a grade for the way for the beauty of the presentation so i don't know what he meant but i i hope he meant how i presented my thesis on the slides so so it was yes and i and it was yeah i got the best grade whatever it's called laude it was called in germany right so you finished this great dissertation and now you're a phd huzzah and so you're you're in germany how in the world did you end up in the united states i mean what was that transition like what happened next after you you graduated and after i graduated it's very interesting again after i graduated i of course i applied before graduation because i i was thinking and i remember laughing with my mentors like what will you do now are you going to go back to romania so if you go back to romania lord visa the the inventor of fights logic told me his words were at the time would be suicide that's what he told us i'm like okay there's no way and my phd supervisor was laughing and said oh yeah you're gonna put your diploma in the kitchen and then cook a good romanian woman and so on so then i applied i applied for scholarships so i got the the prestigious fulbright scholarship in in germany and i also at the same time okay that's another story oh my god i was at a wedding in london and in london it was a croatian wedding so i was an english-speaking woman at a croatian or romanian speaking woman at the croatian wedding in london in london yes that's where the wedding was and have you had you ever been to london before no did you did you have a german passport at that point or did you still have the romanian passport oh my god yes half of my life before i got my canadian passport which is current i spent it at embassies because i was at many conferences during my phd because i published extensively much more than others and i had to go to the to bond to get my visa and my roman passport and stamped and so on for each and every travel indeed and for that london as well i mean by who cared on the train i was reading and learning and writing and yeah and yeah and yeah just let's get one more visa come on what would you have done not go to the conference it was just a single day affair getting a visa or was it a really painful stressful process every time you needed to get a visa what was that it was no it was because we i called them before so then it was i just had to go there with the passport so they see that it's me it's a drivers the same kind of process when you change your driver's license here it's not very pleasant you have to wait in line and they photograph you very similar there as well bureaucracy but you have to be there and it's not in your neck of the woods like with the driver's license you have to go to bonn and you are in darmstadt which is on the other side of germany it just happens so okay so you're at a croatian wedding in london and i said this is the first time passport okay this was probably the first time you'd ever been to london yes okay so you got to do all the sightseeing you saw a big ben and all the others because i didn't have that much money whatever my friend showed me which was impressive enough and and i was there for for her wedding and okay and at that wedding i the croatians were preparing something and i just remained without her because they called her i remained okay what would i do now and there was a guy also who seemed kind of lost so i went to him and i asked him are you also croatian and he said actually no and he was speaking with a very british accent it turned out his wife was croatian and he was also at the wedding just because of her but he was the head of department of brunel university computer science department and we started to talk i said well i'm finishing my phd in darmstadt and so he said oh we don't have any romanian in our department so we start to talk he said send me your phd your cv when you get back so i sent him my cv then i saw myself back to london but now paid by them for an interview and i remember the interview i even remember what they asked me and how i answered and and i am impressed myself now if i how i replied and there was like all this very stiff british professors including the i think the head of department that they were asking me tell us about fuzzy logic and i remember that i charmed them because i was telling them if you look around life is not crisp it's not zero or one we cannot say what is beautiful what is ugly what is right what is wrong so we need to quantify in different terms so they so and then i went back to my hotel and i remember at like in about two hours i got a call and the head of department who i met at the wedding he told me we we are making you an offer are we accepting so i got an offer for a lecturer at bernalillo university in the department of computer science and information systems and at the same time i i got also the fulbright scholarship to remain in germany and continue as a postdoc and that was quite a hard decision for me to make because and i asked again my mentor and my mentor lord visade of course my professor i couldn't ask cause he wanted me to stay with him on the fulbright scholar right so my mentor said a job is a job a post doc is a postdoc right so so i got the job so i went to london so that's what happened i got i i just have to tell you one more thing sure sure please just one more thing about london so i went to london and then my first class my first class was databases i cannot forget that i think no teacher will ever forget that they assigned me to teach databases what was this when relational databases were around relational databases yes so i go to the first class right i had no idea what to expect it was my first class in my own life you had to teach so i go there i prepare as much as i could and then i entered and there were about i think there were 500 people everyone was a first year class or something and so i entered and i see this sea of people and i couldn't breathe i remember very well that and so i had to go out i'm different now guys don't worry i had to go out and to breeze and i remember i was walking outside the amphitheater which was a huge an enormous one and it's saying to myself you can do this behind you can do this you will go back and you will teach this class so i went back and i did it but i remember that it was a shock i see so many people how was your english back then because you had been speaking romania and german predominantly so now you're in london speaking english amongst the english i wish i would remember yes we have to ask them but but i have to tell you in germany yes the immune proof the oral exam the the phd defense had to be in german but i was learning i was speaking mainly english in german okay they were kind of nice with me i probably was speaking with a german accent in when i got in london but probably that's that's normal in technical universities all right so you're teaching databases what was the collaboration like were you the only control theorist in the department or were there other people that had similar interests they were actually very kind and i just reconnected with one of my colleagues from there yes no they were they really wanted to collaborate and this head of department who i met at the wedding for that matter just guys so people that you can network anywhere and take your chances this is my basic here so he he had to go through a review of the department so he really wanted he had those metrics yes how many publications how many grants and so on all these academic bias which you have to pass in order to get funded and and be able to hire more people and so on and so forth so he he told us let's let's collaborate and publish and and give our best there so he created an atmosphere of collegiality and really really wonderful and i also had some wonderful colleagues i remember i just found the paper i can just grab it for you if you want it's called it is about knowledge and belief and it is called the objectivity of knowledge and belief and speaking of fuzzy logic right how objective can it be how objective can beliefs be and knowledge can be and at that time i was absolutely fascinated with that so was this more of a philosophical epistemology paper or was it actual computer science no it was computer science and i will send it to you yes i have it of course only printed now but but the professor is still alive and he is writing a book around this it reminds me of when conway started writing on free will and things like that it's always fun when you have these crossovers but because it is it is about semantics yes and and all these ontologies and how can you actually it is about artificial intelligence and very much what also ben is doing with sophia and so on and so forth but at the time i didn't know about ben and sophia right but but this was like in the 1980s knowledge representation prologue era of ai instead of the deep learning prologue yes okay yeah that was a fun era it didn't it didn't quite pan out the way that japan and others hoped it was going to but they certainly didn't but we were we were big dreamers then i mean we didn't know how it would turn out who cared i mean we lived that those times so were you mostly doing theory or applied work when you were in england was it was it you're just writing papers that have elegant theories or were there actual things like hey let's make a robot walk that type of stuff what what was the totality of your research because you see so in academia it all depends in what department you end up when i did my phd i was in mechanical engineering department and my professor was doing robots and we had a project with daimler and to revolutionize the manufacturing system and that was very hands-on hardware when i got my job in the computer science department so then i even was wondering is computer science or science because we are engineers and engineers we are we kind of know how the world works and so on and so forth so so it was more theoretical at the time yes it was more software coding it depends if you consider coding what is coding is it theoretical or you see i don't know if you delineate right i mean if if your software just runs on a computer and proves something is that more theory maybe if it makes this book from andre soren that i'm supposed to read software in the mind that actually explores this very question and one day when i have the time to read the thousand pages i will have it i want that i'll give it to you next time you're in colorado or when i come to dc that's that it's just a great it's a great rant from a very brilliant person okay so you're doing theory in england and you're at a pretty good university we do a lot of work in england in scotland we have the lab in edinburgh but we also talked to people regularly at oxford and imperial and ucl did you have aspirations to move up the academic hierarchy and go to like what are the old ivy schools there or did you want to actually leave england and keep going west and head to america like what what was the next step in the great career of the now i presume early 30s late 20s professor michaela charles it doesn't work this way not for you we've learned that much no definitely not i mean at that time that was my like hanging on something not to go back to romania and i got a job and i'm gonna do my best in this job so so i was actually it's not i was doing theory i mean i was teaching i was in my i was an academic i'm sorry guys so you get an academic job you're an academic so i was researching and and writing papers and performing at my best in order to to stay there to keep my job in the first place but also i was lucky because i did things which were interesting as i told you yes the objectivity of knowledge and belief i would do it even without a job so i was lucky but at the same time other things opened to me and the same mentor who told me to get the joke so i went of course i kept going to conferences right so i ended up at a conference in berkeley where my mentor was because of course there were many conferences on fuzzy logic there and when i visited there then there was an opening for a post doc there we see him so you were told a job as a job a postdoc is a postdoc and you're like well screw that i'm going to go the other direction talk about control theory syria although it's a postdoc in america so maybe that's something right and and actually this mentor lot fizzade if you guys google him i mean he is one of the he he revolutionized systems theory and control as well but he also had the genius to realize that we do not need all that baggage all that mathematical baggage in order to control things in the real world and therefore he invented fuzzy control and fuzzy logic you just need the rules if then if then it's the smart contracts right he's like okay it could be so simple so all that math can be simplified in like words which can be defined with fuzzy sets so so yeah so it was an amazing opportunity and of course i took it so so that brought me to berkeley which of course it was an amazing environment yeah i mean berkeley is has an incredible math department i mean that's where msri is at tarsky taught there wooden is there it's it's it's a pretty crazy place for logic so you walk into like our our backyard our logic backyard and were you in the comp sci department or the math department or the engineering i was in computer science where my mentor was dean at the time and and stuart russell was my colleague postdoc by the way russell and norwig in berkeley they were they also did did the phds with my mentor with the lord visade by the way and stuart russell has received his chair at the same time the michael smith's chair at the same time as i was still a postdoc there so since then he remained and then he was dean himself a few years ago when i visited him last and he gave me his latest book of course which i i know that you also have and you don't i have norvik's books right over there actually so for those of you who don't know stuart russell and peter norvig are like two titans in this ai space norvig wrote ai a modern approach and it's the canonical undergraduate first year graduate textbook on ai and it's just there and russell has been not only a titan in the publications but also the popularization of the problem of control in ai so how do we when we create a strong ai actually make it beneficial to humanity as opposed to having the terminator scenario so they're both incredible people in the ai world and that must have been a remarkable department where you have all these old leftovers from the sixties and these young guys who are now the old guys but they were like in the height of their productive academic career so what was it like being a postdoc at berkeley with all these colleagues it was amazing but i mean they were just they were people not only it was wonderful i mean we were we were partying a lot it was great and i remember stewart russell got married then as well and now he has so many kids and i just cannot believe that this was my stuart russell so and and norwich that he he just got his job at i mean he got his job at google immediately after the postdoc so one remained in academia one is at google and both of them wrote that book which you mentioned by the way there are co-authors on it yeah but by the way does did norvik wear the hawaiian shirts when he was at berkeley still i don't remember and i really don't i've seen him three times and every time i've seen him he has a hawaiian shirt on so i don't know is this a recent phenomena or if it was a debit to berkeley no probably it's not a recent phenomenon it's quite common but stuart russell is not that kind of guy so for sure yes peter must have been the one so so what type of research were you doing at berkeley and how did was it more applied or more theoretical what was the difference between your english research and the berkeley research and were you still coordinating collaborating with your your old english colleagues or were you mostly publishing with your berkeley colleagues well i was publishing with myself i'm sorry i'm sorry i mean at the time in berkeley it was different yes i mean at least in london we were pub i was publishing with with my colleagues this head of department got us together and created some sort of synergy there but in berkeley it was different it was much more competitive and everyone meant for woman for herself and me independent as i am and believing that only i can have those ideas i was publishing by myself and and it was very well and very good and but i had i had brilliant colleagues and i never considered them and i believe also the other way around as competitors so we were very good friends and and lotfee also did he was an amazing what can i say catalyst mentor and he was encouraging all of us like a father not really literally but at the same time yes i i was more applied because of my background in control and and manufacturing and all this stuff so at that time japan has launched this intelligent manufacturing systems consortium so i moved into that direction more to to apply control engineering to manufacturing so this consortium was actually a big opportunity as well because for example with i could go back to daimler daimler chrysler in germany which i already knew from my professor from my phd supervisor so in all it all connects to everything and you have to always remember yes i mean you would go back because they know you now so i went back and and i created proposals with them for the consortium and yes they changed their system they applied holonic manufacturing to their manufacturing system and i i just had all that experience with real robots and how do you do that if you you can find all those in my publications anyways it's yeah so so i i was going my way they were more theoretical in the computer science in berkeley but i did my my own stuff and that's through that process i also met my another mentor of mine who brought me to calgary so so actually from berkeley i had two opportunities again just very similar to when i finished my phd one was with qualcomm so i was interviewed at qualcomm and they were about they made me an offer for their diagnosis department in qualcomm i remember my interview in san diego i was driving i i rented a convertible and went there and and the interview and it was really really wonderful a wonderful experience with qualcomm in la jolla and at the same time through the colonic manufacturing systems i met a very famous professor from canada dr nori he just passed away also the late dr nori so it's been it's been a while since then and they were all kind of pretty as you can see with white hair already at the time and and he made me an offer but an offer very interesting which i don't know if many academics can refuse but i had many publications much more than anyone who would be let's say applying for an assistant professor so he made me the offer to become a social professor already which is the next rank speaking of ranks so then i thought and as you say charles and don't do this guys i mean yes it's this drive to conquer the academic ladder to prove yourself that you made it and you are tenured and yes yes i'm on top of the universe doesn't have any value really after you conquer it then you're gonna look back and think why why am i in in snowy canada to conquer academia yeah i was gonna say there's a little bit of a difference between berkeley california and calgary canada i mean did you go to the did you become a fan of the rodeo did you go to rodeos and things like that while you're in calgary i mean it's it's a stampede of course of course what was your what was your favorite event was it barrel racing where did you watch the blue riding what was i i i the the horse the wild horses so how do you call it taming yes i do not know if yeah so they jump on the they jump on the wild horse and they try to accommodate yeah yes that's what i liked and of course the cowboys wow i mean i like them all so so yes very very different also very different what can i say different kind of crowd in the prairies i mean you wake up in the morning all the lights are on at all offices right in in california at 10 am they start to have their coffee it's it's totally different it was totally different different lifestyle as well but i didn't care because my goal was to get tenure and be famous and publish and i'm the only one who sings like this and discovers scenes and and it's great i mean it was really great but it's it's a race in which i found myself really i mean looking back now i could have done it much easier but it's you just get on that treadmill that's why i call it the the thread the 10-year treadmill you get on it and then at every conference you have to shine you have to be better than the other no they criticize you when you publish something charles because all your papers are are peer-reviewed here at iohk and sometimes yeah they don't do justice they just want to kill you yeah the worst thing is when you're publishing and the review committee happens to have competing publications and there's supposed to be a recusal system but sometimes you wonder about how that actually works yes and of course i ended up reviewing myself a lot of publications and so on and so forth yeah you're not supposed to do that not for myself no no not what i mean for myself but i was a reviewer as well yes for my peers that's how it works yes i review theirs they review mine and but i of course know i mean at least i think the objectivity of knowledge and belief charles i think i hope i was objective in my own views let's talk about the work life balance so now you're you're in your 30s and i assume this is now the the soviet union has collapsed and the berlin wall is gone things are changing in the world very rapidly the and actually you were at berkeley right when people started talking about the internet and started talking about com stuff and so forth so then you go from that environment to calgary but the world is changing very rapidly so what were you what were you thinking about about beyond academia did you go back to romania and see the rapid changes were there dependents were you sending money home what was going on outside the technical stuff of course my parents my family was in romania yes and yes i mean i was going back my mom visited with me and i remember i i gave her a tour of the glaciers in canada and i also took her to hawaii i didn't know you then charles and was that the first time they left romania in their entire life yes it was the first time she left she actually flew because she visited me in germany when i was doing my phd okay so both my parents but by train of course so so it was the first time that she flew and it was memorable i i also made it memorable for her i remember i took a holiday and i showed her everything there my father didn't want to fly he was in the war he was he had a plane accident in the war and he burned his hands i mean he didn't he was not i mean handicapped because of this but but that was terrifying for him so he didn't want to fly anymore so he never visited me after after germany but i visited him i visited them of course but yes yes i mean it's it is not easy of course to to live such a life but on the other side are also always as i was very independent and and you have to make your choices in life and and really know what you want and what's important to you and i were there any temptations to change and going either become an entrepreneur because of this big tech revolution that was happening or to go back to romania because of all the political changes that were oh no i mean no i was on the academic treadmill no the answer is no although my students were amazing and i i think and and many people know that they were very successful yes and also as entrepreneurs like gareth camp was what was my student in calgary he was my master student and he co-founded uber his master's tvs was in order he called it in order it was about searching with stigma g and like revamping google with stigma query refinement and then he went to california and google liked it and it's called stumbleupon and then anyway he did a lot of other things and he met travis and they started uber that's a different story now he has the biggest and don't get any ideas charles he he has the the most expensive home in hollywood got it so yeah he had a slight come to jesus moment with that uber money but anyway i mean i didn't know at the time that he's gonna be this successful amazing but he was amazing and he came to me from another professor and he asked me he said he doesn't understand me please help me and i did and and he was i can say he was a force of nature i mean definitely so in yeah in spite of this no i was too busy with my academic ladder life and yes conquering the world so you got canadian citizenship eventually or okay yes in the meantime yes that did that as well all right so what what dislodged you from calgary where you were you were on the treadmill where you tenured track to get to the professorship or and did you ever get to the professorship there or did you kind of move horizontally to a different institution that offered a tenure-track position well it's not really like that so okay so i was in calgary and i started to become i'm saying more famous because i believe i was already by then right and in my field of course and it's a time i started to be cold and many people may say because you're a woman and they need a woman here and there but anyway i started to be called on councils i was on the first science technology and innovation council of canada so i was because of my work on information technologies and e-society at the time and and so on and so forth they had a cluster specialized in that and then singapore heard about me from some papers and they nominated me to their science council and then there was a call for canada research chairs in this field a society which is my passion as you probably know and and and i applied and it took about one and a half years i even gave it up i didn't know what's gonna happen and it went through all the levels of scrutiny and review and so on and so forth and then i got a letter surprise you got the channel that is a sharing society and then i had to move right because the chair goes to a certain region of canada where they want to put this cluster of society and elevate this region so i moved to of all to fredericton new brunswick which i don't know if you ever heard of or if you've ever is that more remote than calgary it is i mean you guys maybe not because you guys heard of halifax because of 9 11 because all the planes yeah so it is very close to halifax so nova scotia new brunswick those atlantic provinces which are very close to maine and you have the bay of fundy with those big tides which i probably you probably you should visit all of you should visit this is one of the the seven natural wonders of the world the bay of fundy which is the biggest tide in the world especially on full moon yes it's an experience anyway yes it's remote for for some but for canadians probably not now all throughout this thread from romania to where you were at in canada did you keep up with the poetry did you keep up with the the more art side like were you painting drawing what were the humanities it doesn't work this way this is the wrong question i think mathematics and that is what that teacher in high school actually he opened my eyes to that it's that the common denominator is creativity it can be expressed through poetry through mathematics imagination you it is an intrinsic property which i believe i have from birth i definitely am creative so arts poetry mathematics they are all one for me and did you keep up how could i not it's me i wake up i look at something beautiful full moon i mean i have to write so so you try so that got transformed through your expressions in the papers so what were some of the in your view most aesthetically beautiful things you published or wrote i think the it and of course i'm subjective yes obviously who will know everyone totally objective about your life in your backstory obviously the objectivity of knowledge and belief right okay let me think about that so i think the because obviously that's my passion and and there are a few of them actually but but if you if i am to pick one and your audience should read one is my my take on governance and this is called organic governance so so looking at the world and of course since i wrote it there are many many many more themes which are very similar and i meet people who i didn't know at the time and they didn't know me and and and it's a tribe now but that's that's because it it all comes together so it's it's when i was doing manufacturing as colonic manufacturing system i was looking at the universe as a nested tested hierarchies and then how do you the the manufacturing plant is the universe and then you go down to the raw individual robots and hollands and the pieces there now i'm looking at the society as a colonic system so it's like okay so we are each part of this whole and and how are you going to play together and keep our time out real quickly so what is a whole onix system for for the audience's benefit so so colonic systems have just a few properties so first of all they are nested hierarchies so it's not a what i call toxic hierarchy from top down there is a master and a slave no they are nested they are all together so so like for example yes we have the united states and you have the the the states so you have the country here in washington dc is the capital then you have the states they are nested within this larger country and then you have the cities and from the governance perspective certain things like national defense international relations are being taken care of here in dc but at the state level you have health care and education and at the city level you have snow removal maybe there in denver charles and others have let's say they take care of floodings here because the potomac river is now going overboard and firefighting is at the city level so different governance things are happening at different levels but all of them work together for the benefit of the whole so the idea is that there is a certain subordination and supraordination between these parts which are nested but however they all cooperate for the benefit of the whole end of everyone and this is the this is how at least arthur kessler and of course i mean the yeah is this benefit a property of it a directed intelligence or is it more just an emergent property of simple rules interacting with each other both yes the answer is yes because it starts with the cells yes i mean it is all this organic that that means organic from the elementary particle and this collective intelligence which they have to find each other and actually co-create their whatever they do dna and so on and so forth and to learn so that's how life emerged in the universe and that's that's how that's a property of the universe so that's you're thinking we have this concept and now let's apply this to manufacturing and that was in that was in germany that was applied yes and it was because of this book the ghost in the machine which was written by arthur cursler and he saw that that actually oh actually we can we can animate these machines like control engineering is the machine as a soul has its own it can move wow by itself but then he looked at how life works and then he applied those systems theories from life to machines so yeah but but it is so so it it can be applied to everything but i think it's more important to apply it to governance system because that will help us as a society to be more attuned to how life is governs itself we forgot that we practically work the the master slave on nature yes so we anchored it like me with the academic ladder right nobody will be happy so so so that's the beauty part now how close is this hello structural theory to things like swarm intelligence or these other topics that kind of came voke in the 2000s very close extremely close and i will tell you how i actually came across that so because i was more into this colonic as i mentioned with it it's it is still a subordination and superordination with holonic and i was always thinking oh there is like there is a god which is coordinating everything there and then i remember i was approached by a scientist at a conference and he told me you don't need a god he just came to me after my talk and i said you don't need a god and then he told me about swarm intelligence and how it actually it works and i'm you're right you don't need a god and then the ants it's clear it's they have it's like there is a plan after you see what they create i got something to show you i think you're going to like this hang on a second wow oh you are prepared with everything no okay so on my desk because i'm such a fan of things like swarm intelligence and how simple systems can turn into complex systems yes i have an anti so how they make these is they pour volt and aluminum into an ant hole and then they dig it up and then they spread off and then suddenly you have a a beautiful aluminum cast of all the ants so this is actually what a fire ant hive looks like underground for the audience's sake i have i want to write a poem about this i'm going to remember it i'll send it to you and i just found the concept so so remarkable in fact i broke off one of the pieces a while back just so people could hold it but this is actually what one of the chambers looks so this is literally what ants do underground and they do it somehow through pheromones and some sort of collective communication with each other and it's a truly just an extraordinary field of study and it's it's one of my passions and had i known about it when i was in my 20s i i probably would have studied that instead of the dreary very young no please no one of these days i'll go back to that but but it actually is i agree with you about the beauty of these things this is as beautiful as a a a nocturne or a byron poem there's just so something so incredible that simple rules with simple things working together can just magically create all of this in fact there's a species of ants in the amazon they actually build empires i think they're called weaver ants and they they literally build these gargantuan cities in the trees and they build bridges between it and they actually have century posts on the perimeters and so forth and they're just simple little ants that do all these things they even take their larvae and they use them to make glue to actually glue together leaves and so forth and how they understand how to do all this and an emergent system is is just incredible one of the go ahead and we managed to understand there are of course now robots like swarm robotics marco dorigo in in my time he was the best i think he still is leading in in swarm robotics i mean yes we could get those rules and put them into small bots and coordinate them to do a lot of things like in minority report of course that was my i was giving it as example all the time to my students that's what we're doing here so yes it's fascinating but of course with the ants to see what those ants which you mentioned there are doing like really they find the shortest way to food from their nest without any coordination from the outside just among each other this stigma and then it's like oh i would need if it would be me i would need a controller or someone to to actually show me which way to go to plan the paths but they don't need that and that is smart intelligence it's it's just appears if we could use that as humans in collective intelligence i mean we have the capacity to do that but we do not collaborate enough it i i don't know what is missing maybe we can bridge that i don't know how to do it but i think we will find a way if i knew it i would have done it the the magic of the cryptocurrency space is it's one of the things that inspired me to get into this space was that i i i really thought about where was it going so bitcoin was quite boring because well just a value system it's a bis or a swift replacement and it can't even do pull payments i mean that's that's like okay it's great that you have email for money but bitcoin's not really even money there's nothing intrinsically interesting here but then when i really thought about it it got deeper i said well hang on a second here you're building a system with simple rules that through repeated applications of those rules it can have something to say about value identity and governance in general for a social system across the entire globe a kind of a transnational economy and when i started thinking about that i said well you could probably reconstruct a voting system or reconstruct an identity system or reconstruct the payment system or a stock market from the same set of rules and that was super interesting to me because i said wow if you you can actually create a game that can evolve this way and also i was a big fan did you ever play the game nomic back in the day in the 1980s i may have played it a few times but i can tell you in my life i didn't have much time well it's an academic game so the nomic was interesting because it was a game where the the players would change the rules while playing the game and then you started a simple game and then it kind of becomes gradually more complex as the rules become more elaborate and so i remember that and i was thinking about these systems i said this is something i should get in board with because if it takes off it's an ant colony it would actually replace everything we have and an ant colony it's resilient as hell you see the advantage of having those central planning is that if you actually really carefully look at this hive there's a structural resilience to how it's built so that the ants have many different ways of doing the same thing if desired so if the hive gets attacked if there's a a certain area collapses it's a much stronger system than the fragile systems that central planning the the cathedral type of work instead of the bizarre type of work tend to to cause and i was thinking well social systems are built this way we shouldn't have 2008 we shouldn't have these catastrophic cascading failures inside the system yes i was thinking exactly it's anti-fragility right now because yes and yes okay so how did you end up in the united states back in the ask you're in calgary you're starting to climb the chain you're on all these committees and boards you're you're becoming the proper academic you yeah international recognition so you're you live in dc so obviously there are some some missing pieces between calgary and dc it's a bit of a journey yes and of course as i mentioned halifax for your audience but it was actually fredericton but okay and the canada research chair don't forget and that came with tenure hey so so yeah i conquered it but but then i realized that actually there's nothing to conquer and and it was like okay well now i've done this so now what so in in my research i was focused on this on everything which had to do with e at the time yes like e-hells society social networks how do we do things swarm maybe collective intelligence you name it complex systems and at the same time i got involved in some very interesting consortia and projects and i like to organize a very large scale like flagship projects the future of medicine or the universal fabricator for that matter which is the matter compiler i don't know if i ever mentioned this to you but the second fun neumann machine i don't know if of it yeah so first one machine was this the compiler the bits and then the matter compiler yeah so we were working towards it with norman packard and steen rasmussen from santa fe institute and we applied to the european commission with this universal fabric all right right well my mind is blown a matter compiler you could have a compiler we have to do it and this is this is the 3d printer but imagine you have it everybody has it in their garage and you can print your cups or your clothes your everything depending on what you put in it what materials you put there and this is what actually the theory you can you can it's only wikipedia the the second phenomena machine so and and with this so of course i i created a huge consortium with with people from all over the world to to work on this on this issue and then i met a company a startup who was really amazing it's called maxellar technologies i don't want to make promo to promote any companies here it was long ago but because you asked me so they were doing the fastest computing in the known universe which a stanford graduate who started this company from from a famous stand for professor lab you can find them all online but and and they brought me to the us because they wanted me to lead their office in the u.s and i mean at the time i conquered the academic ladder why not and i really liked it and i may have gotten to build a universal fabricator with their computers the fastest computers in the known universe and and they had the main office in london so i i was going between between the us and london and and in the end i i ended up also through some consortia and through my work on governance it's it is when you start to publish you are being you charles right i'm sure you receive millions of emails and stuff and and text and so on so i received a lot of invitations to to participate in other things and on councils and so on and so forth and that's what also brought me to mit so mit was at the time speaking of bitcoin i mean we found it more fascinating than you find it now because i mean so much more about it but i mean for us it was like wow it's amazing were you in sea sale or where at mit did you go no it's a media lab the media lab okay yes yes and at the at that time there was an mit bitcoin club i think maybe maybe many of your audience has have heard of it i don't know but what innovative crazy professors can do they can get bitcoin please don't tell this to anybody we sell grants and then give to students for free to see what happens this is the media lab right the media lab kind of stuff and and many many interesting things happened i mean students started companies and guess what some of them are very famous i'm not gonna name them but but they were successful so that's how i i came across cryptocurrencies and of course it was like like satoshi obviously my dream me having been born and experienced i would say yes the most fragile years of my life in a dictatorship and now there's satori which gives us freedom yes it's a very v for vendetta type of a thing exactly right so so i embarked on it full full speed with my whole heart as charles and and your vision is just so aligned well we'll we'll get to iog in a bit but we're almost contemporary because we're not media lab post bitcoin so what was sandy like what was alex pentland i mean i read his book on idea flow and he's he's very proud of his work i'll say that much yes i i don't know him like that i mean cindy is a wonderful human being this is how i know him i mean i just know him as a wonderful human being i i worked with him in media lab but not only there also in at the world economic forum he was the chair of the data-driven development council and i was a member of the council so he is one of the sweetest people i know i don't know if he would like to hear that but but that's that's my experience of sandy and of course people say that he is the most powerful data scientist in the universe so i think putting them together it's wonderful a wonderful a wonderful person but i i was not his student i had a former student who was his student and he told me some stories i do not know maybe he told them to you as well that is yaniv i know yaniv very well yeah that was the endor project that we talked about it in tel aviv when i i don't know if y'all never told you how he progressed his office from next to the janitor to next to sandy pantler's apprentice office and how many papers he had to write and how much he had to prove himself but he did so yes so yeah i do not know maybe they have a different opinion about sandy but i know i know that sandy i know so yeah it's wonderful so yeah media lab was is just such a fertile beautiful area for innovation product was niha there when you were at media lab yeah yes actually she was much she came later i think maybe at least in chicken later to my attention right well yeah because they started the cryptocurrency yeah the dc group yes yes the dci yes that was that was in my opinion much later because we were there with with clipping gear who clippinger was a colleague of pentland also a fellow at mit that's how i met him and that's when we wrote the book from bitcoin to burning man and we did this underground retreats in clipping jurors home in new hampshire actually it was not his home it was wind hover a wind hover retreat so he invited some a few let's call them i don't want to call them robin hoods anymore because now robin was named as tainted by that company but we were those anarchists plotting the new world and the independent and the sovereign identity and yeah so it was an amazing time and the feeling also that because i remember the sec was going after some of these startups which were with us in the retreat and we saved their buds because we wrote letters to the sec so they don't send those people to jail right it was yeah it was like those beginnings i'm sure you have been through it all as well so for the audience's benefit let's talk about self-sovereign identity that was john's big contribution there what's that concept all about how how do we contrast ssi to a normal identity that we're kind of used to every day yes the normal the normal you see and identity there are so many people like christian k meyer he disagrees with all what we will discuss here because he says identity you cannot do that i'm an identity you are an identity you cannot level us in any way even if i'm more sovereign than you okay so with that excluded this out of the way the normal identity is a centralized thing in which the government has control of everything all portfolio data and and absolutely everything and not only the government but the banks the facebooks whatever you define as your identity it belongs to them it's not something which is yours you do not have control of it so how can you be sovereign i mean i'm like okay i moved from romania i went through all this hardship to be the best at my phd to conquer the academic ladder to make it finally to the wonderful free country of the universe usa and what do i find i'm sorry what is the liberty what is the id the sovereignty where is where are these yes anyway so what what self-sovereign identity is when i actually have the power to show you about me whatever i want and if i want it right i mean the bartender why would he care about my age or my address or everything else he cares yeah i'm above 18. okay give me my beer and leave me alone so the the facebooks of the world the banks the everything okay you you do not need to know all that so it is it is about dignity i would say in the first place self-sovereign identity is is a matter of dignity of the fact that actually i'm an individual i respect myself and then i do not need to depend on anyone if i choose so i have that choice this is how i see it but of course where i'm coming from so i'm sure i'm biased it's it's funny i was in israel years ago at eurocrypt and i ran into phil zimmerman there the guy created pgp and we had this long discussion about what would have happened had web of trust actually taken over and it became the standard thing not only would we have a password-free internet but we'd probably have self-sovereign identity at this moment yes the missing identity layer of of the internet and in the attempt to fix the fact that something like that's missing has just been horrendously difficult i remember years ago eight years ago i was at a conference in new york and i ran into menu spawny and he comes up and he says charles i have this brilliant idea we call it a did a decentralized identifier i said what do you want to do with it he's oh we're going to go to w3c we're going to make it a standard i got chris allen with me it's going to be great i said well how long is that going to take man oh two years it'll be down at two and i think they've just finished the first standard of it almost 10 years later it's such a herculean task and they're still useless you have to do a lot of batteries not included to actually yeah so it's a it's a bear of a problem actually how do you make a practical portable identity and do it but you're absolutely right in my view it's so fundamental because whoever controls the identity gets to decide basically who's real and who's not real they can decide if you have real credentials or not they get to thrive if you're a good person or a bad person and if they can create labels accordingly they can use those labels politically to basically influence whether people are legitimate or not so it's a superpower and it's it's surprising that people don't realize how dangerous it is to hand that naively to others including private companies as we've seen recently like credit score is a great example of that yes exactly and and we are manipulated because of this i mean this is one of the biggest things that this has led to the plague of our society right now yes whatever is happening with the social networks with with the world in general okay so one last hop you ended up in dc so what brought you to washington dc from boston oh man i'm sure you will not guess that but guess what a government company this which is which is called freddie mac i'm sure you've heard of it speaking of credit and stuff like that i've had some influence over the foundations of our field [Laughter] they decided they want an innovation lab okay and guess what i got a call and they thought i'm the one who has to establish it and lead it and hire everyone is it in it so here i am in washington dc setting up an innovation lab at at freddie mac but that was some years ago i mean i think 2016 17 something like that so yes so i i ended up doing that and but they were very slow so i remember when when i decided that i had enough of you guys they were telling me we're not there yet so sorry we're doing there yet but of course so i i cannot tell you many details about what was happening there but many i mean we were yeah i better don't a little more details but but we we were working with a few banks and a few also yeah being a mortgage company you can imagine yeah there there's a lot of companies which try to digitize mortgages and and so on that there were some innovative at the time which we were looking at so they were doing those kind of applications applying blockchain self-sovereign identity not was not really on their agenda but how to apply blockchain for the credit and to give better credit to people and and especially to reduce the amount of paper and bureaucracy in the loan process mortgage process which we all know how horrible and horrendous it is right how simple it can be done so we're finally at the present and then we get to talk about the future my favorite topic so you're here and you're working with iog so what exactly do you do for us a dream a dream come true exactly that's what i'm wondering as well what am i doing for you i feel it's it's fun having the ride of my life i am i am really i feel right on track and with my tribe so well officially it is called okay the official yes title is strategic partnerships leader whatever that is whatever the that is i don't come up with the titles i would call it strategic partnership catalyst because i bring i i i think not that i bring but i i i point some niches which i think would have high impact and it's not only strategic partnership it's strategic impact actually that's that's how it is called yes the high impact the united nations project the disenfranchised which actually i don't know if i bring them i think they come to your charts so that's why i'm i'm riding that wave so i i'm bringing like renewable energy the sdg is everything that can be enhanced with blockchain and not only with artificial intelligence with iot as you are working with all these amazing scientists from wolfram to to ben bertzel and and so on and so forth and to find solutions i think you were the one who brought ben into our orbit if i recall correctly yes so you see i am an impact if you like singularitynet it's this woman just let everybody know and you want to talk a bit about e-govern yes so e-govern is is doing actually what what we call government as a service governance as a service so with my passion for your society this is what i think i've done all my life and this is where we're headed so egovern is is a very innovative company which is a very good very good alliance i would say for for what we are doing here because the purpose is to enable organic governance and we can do that with the technology today and to actually e the functions of government which start from giving everyone a right to have a say which is with their identity and the voting yes so voting my voice yes i have a say in governance in making decisions yeah that's number one but it's much more so it is all the functions of government they can be so much streamlined not to mention it's very similar with what i was mentioning about the freddie mac yes the bureaucracy so we can streamline everything make it so much easier and smoother all these functions and that is what egovern is doing but of course there are some particular projects which i would you to talk about if you want because i do not know what it can be disclosed and what not from the details this is government as a service is the idea yes and it comes from the individual up to the smart city going through education through helps all these functions can be streamlined i can have an electronic passport for my vaccine for my health for my back all my vaccinations if i'm flying somewhere and okay let's see can you do i need to quarantine or not here i am but for now we don't have that so it has to be done right now i remember flying into tanzania and they said you have your yellow fever vaccine right i'm like sure i had it on by the way on a yellow piece of paper the international vaccine passport system yes so for those of you this is not public knowledge but it we'll make it public we're right now doing the the goals for cardona 2025 and we're working with a major consultancy who shall remain nameless for the moment but hopefully we'll be able to announce them soon but their big brand name a little north of dc and one of the things that we'd like to do is run an entire country's back end on cardano it's a goal of cardona 2025. and so e governor is an example of well conceptually how do you think about that and there's a lot of like for example hashcash and digit cash were proto bitcoins there are kind of proto governments that could run on a blockchain an example would be the estonia project that came out where they tried to digitize as much as possible in their economy it didn't quite work out as well as they hoped but it was still a major leap forward and what's really cool is we've noticed that there's a tremendous appetite actually for these types of things whether it be a carab id system or just fixing some of the mistakes that were made in large economies when they first tried to digitize or a philosophical question of whether you actually can do e-voting or not in fact we like to talk about e-voting and the old is new the new is old there was a lovely paper recently for ron rivest at out of mit and several other authors basically all over e-voting especially blockchain-based e-voting and they had a lovely set of five criteria about all the problems there so it's an interesting and incredibly colossal problem of how do you actually govern a country on a blockchain and what innovations and economies of scale do you get and also can a country exhibit the same thing as an ant hive where you have these emerging interactive properties where you build this beautiful resilience thing that can service a need whether it be property registration or something else and it somehow works and a lot of people say well that's just not possible but i was recently at a major telco where we were having it and they shall remain nameless until an mou comes out but we were talking about india versus the united states the united states spectrum is heavily regulated it's very oligarchal it's top down from the fcc in india it's a cutthroat brutal marketplace where you have this patchwork of micro isps together and somehow despite that usually you can get pretty good service and it's like eight bucks a month if that for a subscription for a 4g phone with unlimited data so that's a an ant system of resilient stuff from the bottom up patchworking to provide coverage for 1.