Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Hello and welcome to the WHERS 2022 Conference and the unveiling of the UniRanks platform. The UniRanks platform is built in a way to make it possible for everyone to contribute and to be an integral part of this project to the Open Rank Concept.

Today, we are going to have a panel discussion, Leading Forward: Distributed Ledger Technologies for Education and Government Institutions, the power of trustless immutability.

As the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies, DLTs or blockchain technology enables not only portable and secure digital identity creation but educational record-keeping degree conferral authenticity and guarantees of students and faculties and the digitalization of national higher education results and our discussion panel today is going to talk to the development and applications of blockchain technology in education and the need for creating educational pathways so that industry executives can find and hire the right talent with the right transdisciplinary skill sets.

In our discussion panel is Randall Funke. He is a multi-talented and experienced software developer who has been building enterprise level applications since 1999 and he is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University.

Mr. John Walker, he is the CEO and chairman of wholesale technologies, and Dr. Melanie Rolli, who is not only a board member and advisor to serial biotech but she has also been a CEO business development in commercial activities, leader in different biotechs and she has a strong experience in global drug development and vision. First, I'm going to go to Mr. Funke and Randall, could you explain to our audience a little bit about Distributed Ledger Technologies?

Randall Funke
Sure. Well, back in the early days of computer platform development, there was something called the client server relationship, which was essentially a centralized way of dealing with people accessing data.

This is your setup that you still see a lot now and it's basically, you have a central server and a bunch of people around that. However, the evolution of that has led to something called the blockchain. The blockchain is an attempt to gain immutability in truth for transactional awareness across an entire system at the same time so that there's not actually a central source of truth, it is distributed amongst the blocks that are in the network.

Now, a Distributed Ledger takes that one step further and says, we don't even need to package these transactions inside of a block and then work hard to verify that. We're just going to allow those things to exist in the ledger and our algorithmic verifications of truth that happen in a couple of different ways linearly, astrosonistally, and holographically. In fact, work to actually verify these transactions and reduce the amount of costs/energy/time to get to this consensus which is what really all of these distributed and even blockchain-based Ledgers are trying to achieve.

Now, there are probably six, seven big concepts right now in distributed technology. I'll quickly just go through them really quick.

One of them is called the directed acyclic graph, which is a type of distributed technology but the idea is that for every transaction that happens, the network has to verify two previous transactions. It's sort of like a one step forward to verify two back and this solves a problem with congestion in a more linear type blockchain network.

Now you've introduced another dimension, basically. You think of blockchain as almost two-dimensional. Your old server was one-dimensional, blockchain’s kind of two-dimensional. DAG is kind of three-dimensional in the sense that it tries to grab two previous data points at once.
OK, you can see where I'm going with this.

Another one that's really big is one that's called hashgraph and that utilizes yet another type of algorithmic truth or immutability by this idea of broadcasting out to a network and then verifying the fact of the thing that was broadcasting against the consensus.

Now, you're starting to introduce kind of almost another dimension which in a way would be time because the time that the transaction occurred now also has to do with the immutability of or the verification of the truth. If I can still catch on my screen but I have some supporting chart documentation that you can take to look at this.
Now, a very interesting next level one is called Holochain, which isn't really a blockchain at all. Holochain is actually more of an instance based holographic way of reaching this idea of truth where now instead of a transaction of frosted distributed ledger being verified equals truth. Now, you can actually have a level up, which would be an instance, which would be an ecosystem unto itself, that would be part of a larger ecosystem of similar types of clusters, all contributing to this idea of truth.

In a way, the Holochain is really good for platform-like development. If you have a suite of applications that you want to use and those are replicated many times in your ecosystem, you can use whole holographic data to get a snapshot of the entire ecosystem and each individual instance feeds into that and the combination of those things sort of create this holographic idea of truth and that three-dimensional or even fourth dimensional look at it is how you verify that the entire ecosystem is functioning in a truthful way.

I see that one existing more in the realm of application development whereas maybe some of the other ones are more suited towards financial transactions and things like that because they speed things up. They can scale forever and there's no cost involved but holochain looks at an ecosystem and then attaches it to this idea of DNA that then becomes the source of truth and then that becomes replicatable, and it really takes its cues actually from your own biological systems. That's interesting to me.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
That’s like a biomimicry.

Randall Funke
Almost.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Like a biomimicry. Randall, so now that we have Dr. Rolling and John Walker. I have a couple of questions. One for John. John, have you have you thought about these systems and how they might be integrated into everyday life? And Dr. Rolli, you as a CEO, listening to this, what comes to your mind first and foremost when you think about the future of let's say, a large company? John, if you could come first and then Melanie.

John Walker
Sure, Dr. Cowin. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the panel as well. The concepts for our company, we came from frustration of having multiple different systems, softwares, AI, all in one place where you and even so everything from email to excel to AI to all these different systems wouldn't provide or execute the simplest of tasks when it actually came to actual production to the actual movement of whatever it is good services or applications that you needed to get done as for any company and so we came from the shipping maritime industry originally and we watched as they beat their heads against the wall with Randall just said about, the two-dimensional blockchain and the bottlenecking and well, what we saw was an opportunity to try to figure out.

I don't know if you guys are-- This might give my age away. Look, I have a baby face but back in the 80s they had neural networks were in its infancy and they made one that could play chess. When that person-- When they had the chess champion of the world. I remember it was on CB, it was on the news and everybody's after dinner was watching it and this computer beat the chess champion over and again.

Well, the thing is artificial intelligence, for example, is probably the worst label you can give that technology. Number one, it's not artificial and number two, it's not intelligent. It's biased by the coder and it's just machine learning.

For example, if I have this beautiful, nice hot cup of coffee that machine learning will grab a hot cup. Don't touch that cup again, go to the next one and it has no idea that maybe if I come back 15 minutes later, oh, this is the most brilliant cup of coffee. I need it. Now, where does that come into play for education? Because this is specifically, we're talking about education and government institutions.

Well, where that comes into play? Well, the two-dimensional blockchain like Randall was talking about, you get bottlenecks. It's going to slow everything down. It's very-- It's not useful. It's maybe useful for that game of chess. You can teach how to play the game of chess and it's going to win every time but how are you going to going to take that and for example, with our industry where we were born from the maritime, a very complex environment there could be in for education, there could be the next Stephen Hawkings and your university and you can be passing it up because you're utilizing systems that are saying cup hot, don't drink. Right? Meanwhile, inside that cup, you have the next Stephen Hawkings, you have the next Einstein and how we can explain that? How I can explain this would be this system, what we've done is we've taken bits and pieces of what Randall was talking about as well as is existing legacy systems that people are familiar with, so that we can basically make a cocoon around it and interact so that you, for example, many-- We are for government's which is like police departments, which are not in use police departments because an investigation into criminal activity is not much different than researching cyber security for a university.

A university could have seven different departments researching cybersecurity and police department could have seven different departments working on different investigations. Now, they could say this one cup of coffee could have this. You know what? It kind of fits in my investigation but it doesn't really fit in what the particular department is researching in that but another department could very well need that cup of coffee but not know it exists because it's not communicating with the other departments.

Same thing with police departments. Same thing with fire departments. Same thing with urban planning and same thing with FinTech. Same thing with military intelligence, the whole. I mean, the list goes on and on and if you apply these things the same way that we applied when the internet came, we all were so super excited, right? When I can remember, my father brought the Commodore 64 home, we thought that was the greatest thing ever, right? And if we apply these new advanced technologies that were coming on the same linear mindset that we did back then, we're going to end up with the same linear dead-end that we ended up in today.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Well, that's actually a great segue to Dr. Rolli, who is struggling with exactly what you're describing Dr. Rolli.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Yes, thank you very much. Thanks for having me this afternoon. As a physician and a biotech executive, I'm spending most of my time trying to get new medications faster to patients and we operate in a highly regulated environment. That's true for the data that we're collecting around manufacturing. That's true that for the data that we're collecting around patients’ response to our medication. That's also true for the talent that's working along that value chain, generating data about themselves and their skill set, but also moving these processes forward to get drugs faster to patients through the approval process and the manufacturing.

If you look at this, these are individual systems that are highly complex where information gets transferred from one entity to another. If you look at the company who then transfers the information to a regulator, for example, you would hope that the systems really talk to each other and this all remains intact that the information that you transfer doesn't get lost and what we talk about the truth really makes it one from one point to another.

The concepts apply there on several levels of the work we're doing. My challenge is that we're, of course, trying to recruit talent to help us alongside that value chain but they usually come either out of science or out of medicine or out of technology or out of business but very rarely, are they familiar with the overall processes and systems and certainly, with the integrated way, you're thinking of driving the idea of a new molecule all the way through a probability manufacturing into a patient head somewhere in the world on the highly regulated and high quality conditions.

Randall Funke
Wrong people.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Well.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Randall, what did you want to say?

Randall Funke
No, I was just kidding around saying she's been hanging out with the wrong people.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
I think it's very difficult because Melanie, really, when she recruits, she recruits researchers who are really familiar with the research, the molecular research that she's working with, and they are usually lab rats.

Would that be right, Melanie?

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Yes, I think that's a pretty fantastic..

John Walker
Can I bring up that topic of Einstein real fast?

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Yes.

John Walker
If we were using these algorithms that we use today to find talent, Einstein never would have got his job at the patent office. He was not a very good student because of his uncle, and we wouldn't be having this conversation because we wouldn't have any idea of what the Doppler Effect was. We wouldn't have any idea of even gravitational waves or concept of time and space and how gravitational waves play a part of that, right? And that is very important for us to have satellites overhead to make sure this internet connection is proper, our phones work correctly. We wouldn't have any of that. We would have nuclear power plants.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
But we don't know that for sure. But one thing we do know is, I think, in Melanie's, Dr. Rolli’s frustration is really as an executive. Where do you find these multiple skill sets and where are they in degrees? Tell us about one of the things that happened to you?

Randall Funke
They’re writing code. They're not advertising themselves because they're too busy working on.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
But that's exactly the point. Let me give you an example out of real life, OK. There are large organizations in my field, of course, who introduce what they call the chief innovation officer, who was exactly looking for something that you're describing. The truth also is that a lot of the people who would write code are not particularly interested to fulfill a role like this because it does not match what they want to do all day long, but I think we have to find a way to transfer the knowledge.

The people who sit there and write code, they have to be familiar with the needs that we have in having a larger organization and find a way to transfer the information both ways but what I experienced right now. I hire highly skilled people in terms of medical science or other things but they're not even familiar, to be perfectly honest, with the manufacturing process and how to get one thing from A to B.

The problem applies not just to coding. Even though that's a big one and I agree with you and maybe I'm hanging around with the wrong people but please introduce me to the right ones

Randall Funke
We’re here.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
But how do we get that knowledge that might be terribly basic in your view into a mindset of a very different functioning organization out of the gate.

John Walker
Oh, I was just going to say that that's exactly how we started. The concept of our company, we looked at it and we saw that you have lots of these companies, you have all these people with letters behind their names with graduated from Stevens or MIT and they made these technologies that were on the front line management frustrated with.

No pun intended but instead of building the ship from the bridge to the hole, we decided to build the ship from the hole to the bridge. Meaning, how do we make sure that we don't automate people out of the system because without the human intuition, you're not going to get it done? It's never-- Like you just said, you don't you need to know.

My guys may know how to do the brainiac stuff but how do I get my supplies from point A to point B? They don't have a clue. The transfer knowledge is something that you set up. I just wrote it down and put a star which is huge and that's exactly how we've designed our systems is so that that transfer knowledge is almost not even difficult, it's seamless, it's literally giving you-

Randall Funke
You have to be around people, for example, myself. I mean, all of-- 90% of my ability to develop a solution resides in two areas. One, it's to be able to have a lifestyle around me that fosters creativity so that I might be playing guitar but I might be thinking about an issue that I'm dealing with and there's an individual passion creative element to this.

On the other side of that, there is absolutely no substitute for real life experience in solving problems when there is a lot of people breathing down your back a real issue and you have to learn how to operate something that's highly complex.

If you're fixing a bug when there's a lot of people looking over your shoulder and I think being able to move in between those two states is really where I've seen the best people live. They’re free.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
I'm totally with you. Maybe I can pull it a little further back. The challenge of someone who runs a biotech is you're always out of money, OK. You always are very resource constrained.

What I am hoping is very often missing is that when people come on board for their expertise, they never learned to think that crossway in their higher education when before they come in and I think that is-- Maybe that's where we can sort of help influence the system saying, we're really delighted that you're the expert in what you're bringing to the table but we need you to think outside the box. We need you to think, left, right and center and see what other disciplines are around you that when you're faced with a real-life problem that you, of course, probably fall onto your own expertise but we need to also to think about other pieces of the puzzle and I think--

Randall Funke
You can't be siloed in your code, you can't be siloed in your application. You have to be a level above so that while you're developing in your mind, singularity only or whatever, you're also for a certain elegance that begins to show itself as it can relate to the greater picture. I don't know, it's like macro and micro at the same time. It's just the type of person that does that.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
When we think about where we are on our trajectory of implementation of technology, we have to be very clear that we are in a VUCA environment – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and I don't feel that generally, in educational institutions, we work from that space because one of the things from a supply chain logistics to an educational institution taking in international students from across the world to a biotech executive who is doing research, there's always going to be a lot of ambiguity involved in what we're trying to solve because if it was just a sequential recipe, then a computer could solve it for us but those are not the intuitive leaps that we have to figure out how to foster and nurture that in students and then that brings me to this last part.

When you John, and when you Melanie, when you go and you're looking for new talent, right? They have a diploma but what's in that diploma? What is it that you actually see?

Now Randall explained to us the power of these digital ledger technologies and it is my understanding that within a, let's say, a degree conferral that could be done on one of those chains, you could actually embed certain skill sets right? Because now you can take a look as an employer and inside. This is a secure transmission of real data but inside your hashtag or random, maybe you will explain it a little bit and inside it, there is a skill set listed. OK and now you as an employer, take a look at the courses, take a look at the skill set and you can say I think these are skills that in addition to whatever else I need that I'm going to really favor this applicant.

Randall Funke
It's Carfax for humans, OK but it happens now. It happens forever and it's infinitely granular or macro depending on what data is entering in the system.

If you were talking to me because I've been thinking about this for a while, it's something that we do it. It's kind of, again, the main thrust of our company, Johnny’ that when you think of the idea of a transaction that now can be anything because we have smart contracts, we have the idea of immutability of truth.

Rather than looking at somebody's resume when you're trying to hire them, you can actually look at every piece of job data and performance analytics that happened across every place they've ever worked and every experience they ever have. If you had a common application suite with a blockchain that could record the events and if you can do that, you can then get very detailed information. That's like vetting somebody for employment 1000 times better than just seeing if they went to college, have a resume, and aren't a criminal.

You can see how they performed on their last 10 freelance projects or what did their professor rate their last thesis. You can actually get this real data to get better insights into that human as they traverse their life, and you can do it on the other end too.

You can say this company was very truthful in the way they vetted their employees and here's the historical way. It's spidered out over time or contracted back in time. Across all of that is the idea of truth, right?

Somebody employed me, I did the job. I did 20 tasks, I did them well. My employees signed off on them and now that's written into the blockchain in some one of these blockchains and I can recall that so that when I'm looking for the job, they just can pull up the whole thing and say, no way back in 2002, you actually worked on this project for these guys. I knew a guy that did that, wow and then you can really start to get to know what you're doing and see how this person can actually think outside the box and then you can meet them and talk to them and all that goes into it too.

It's like, I think it's a path to freedom but it's through truth. It's not through ideas or what somebody says. It's through actual behavior. I think that's something to look into and thanks for sharing my blockchain thing.

Those are just some of the major distributed Ledger's that exists now. It starts to seem like-- Its funny, it's always like tribal. For me, it's like there's always seven kinds of permutations of a certain type of symmetry in a given tribal system and you see this with Blockchain.

Now to start with, it’s very simple client server, then it went up a level, then the whole chain is another level and then the one subsequent or just a twist on that whole thing. You know, they just--

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Let me ask Melanie, looking at this, are you in all familiar even with it?

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Yes, it stops at the blockchain decline server. That's clear that was Pharma has been doing for the last 20 years. I think the blockchain is where the industry is starting to get experience but I think is a little gun shy still and the Holochain, I think, is we're not close to that.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
OK but what I'm saying is, have you ever met anyone in your industry as either a CEO or is someone who is heading a big research department who really understands something like this at all?

Dr. Melanie Rolli
Yes, other people who understands this but I would say this is still the exception.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
OK, I say that in terms of educational institutions, that is incredibly important for the needs of future projects and CEOs that are leading forward. We're leading forward, we're not educating medicine for an 18th century patient basis. We are leading forward with research that unravels the code of life.
Now, John, you-- I know that you're currently looking for a very specific person for your company, right?

John Walker
Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Do you want to tell us about your, about what it is that you need to do right now in order to find this person, whereas using something like this might be useful?

John Walker
Well, first of all, yes. Well, we're looking for an electrical engineer that has a very specific set of skill sets because there's a million different types of electrical engineering but we need people that are more-- I don't want to divulge too much into our--

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Right. But you need something very specific?

John Walker
Yes, somebody who has specific industry experience in electrical engineering, but I think one of the parts that Randall was touching on and you, Dr. Cowan were touching on that. All three of you are touching on that, I think we would be remiss not to touch to speak about is that I went to Base University all of us, obviously pretty well educated. The thing is that I went into the frontline management from there and I had to deal with-- I've had some pretty crappy jobs I'm not going to lie in the past but how do you and I think what-- I'm sorry, Dr. Melanie, I forgot your last.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Dr. Rolli.

John Walker
Yes. I apologize. What you're, I think you're frustrated with, is the fact that you have people that are very well qualified, right? That they're well qualified and I've seen this higher education, both my father and some other professors. I see this in college. I see these people being educated and what higher education misses is, for example, for me working on the docks in New York and the supply chain is in the news, right?

This is something that we can all relate to and see. Somebody that got a high education or high degree says, hey, I know all this from a book but he's never argued with a drunk, Chechnyan chief on a ship at Port Newark at two o'clock in the morning. Right? And he's never had to argue with Vinnie, the shop foreman that runs the ILA.

It says his crane operator gets a-- How do you mix the two? How do you get that so you could find like Randall said, somebody that really fits what you need using these systems but then you still need something to integrate them.

And for the reality of the people that have the grease, the dirty hands on a so to speak, the guys with the calluses on their hands, be the boots on the ground, the guys and gals that are out there working the warehouses. The guys and the gals that are out there working the planes to go ahead and just these things to the model ships and so what that's kind of what we've designed is a place where you can integrate all that into one place so you can have that, you could find that perfect candidate and maybe they're capable of sheer here are capable of thinking outside of the box, based on what you are presented with the Holochain or the more advanced blockchain but how do you still know they're going to be able to understand how to argue with that Chechnyan chief mate that’s drunk at two o'clock in the morning?

They need some way to have that operational experience that they did not get in college and you cannot get. It can take 20, 15, 30 years to get that education in order to know how to argue with that Chief mate.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
Well, I mean, there are. In Europe, we have the cooperative learning so that you have to actually do internships for like three to four months or you work with. Melanie, you are familiar with this. You work while you study in a company. There are concepts like that and I am certainly because we are talking to higher education and the unveiling of this UniRank platform.

One of the things that for the people who are participating in perhaps listening to our panel discussion is perhaps to find a pathway because UniRanks invite stakeholders, right? The question is, who are stakeholders? Stakeholders are you John. Stakeholders, are you Melanie. It's not just me as a professor. It is industry specific also. How would someone from a biotech industry who is a stakeholder because they hire people out of universities, how can they participate? And what tools do people look for?

Because I think that the idea of having trustless contracts is what's called an immutability is becoming ever more important, biopharma and active ingredients, it's all over the place.

Randall Funke
I was just going to say you have to excuse me because I do have to go in a few minutes.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
OK.

Randall Funke
It used to be that you would hire a database person to structure your data. You can accept data from all of these places including your medical records, the whole nine yards.

Then, a couple years back, you needed a day as a data scientist that was someone that could analyze your database and figure out the best way to pull all the data together.

Now what you need is someone that understands distributed Ledger's and immutability. You need to understand that because now there's not a person that is your source of truth anymore. It's your-- It's actually the network and the plot. I'm the-- I'm saying blockchain but the ledger they use to write to. That's going to tell you the truth about your system. There's not a person anymore.

You need someone that understands how to basically create a scalable, immutable solution that leverages your existing platform because you've got a bunch of them. There's your ecosystem, it's got to take that and now connected in to these, for lack of a better word, nodes that are part of this ledger and then those can work together to say, yes, what this is true because that's true and this is true and all of a sudden, you've got a clearer picture of the data that's happening across not only your network but all networks that are utilizing your data also get it to that scalability level.

Here's the deal, you become a trusted source and when you become a trusted source, now you can open up your trusted data for other people to leverage, right? It scales beyond your internal systems, you become a source of truth and I think that's really the thing that's missing in these larger systems.

There's a lot of data all over the place but you're hoping somebody can pull it together and say, this is what happened and I'm saying that where we are right now, we're bad jobs over, it's now going to talk about the actual data in the system and how that gets verified across different systems period.

Dr. Melanie Rolli
The content that you're describing for medical research is incredible because you would really lose redundancies, you don't have to repeat experiments anymore, you do it. The truth is, it's accessible and with this, we could take up speed. That's very different now.

Randall Funke
No seconds to understand the entire DNA mapping of a project that 30 disparate scientists are working on across the globe. How do they all know if they're looking at the same stuff, same thing?

I'll just say one other thing about on sadly, I think we can. I'll do another one of these. Once I get going, I don't stop but the other thing is they have to understand more than blockchain because, for example, if you're working-- Our company, we have tools that our users use, and those tools are suite of applications and that's one node in our holochain ecosystem.

It's like getting people to change medical record data tracking platforms is a possible you can hook into that and create this immutability around these present systems. That's why understanding just a distributed ledger is really important because you'll never get the speed that you can get from those with like blockchain. It's just like you want to travel three dimensions or four dimensions. You want to factor or do you not want it to be so they have to understand how these different systems work and in that PowerPoint, those are the big permutations, right?

And if you look at it, you're going to see how it scales up from server and then Holochain is kind of holographic. The other ones have their own way of doing verification and they all attempt to be fast.

Some rely on timestamps. Some rely on just the order of the way things happen. They do things in slightly different ways but they're all trying to come to this consensus, truth statement and we're getting closer and closer to real time with that, with these distributed Ledgers.

Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin
I'm going to be closing this discussion because I think it was fascinating and I think one of the things that this WHERS conferences done is, it has brought people from different areas. Right? John, you are in? You are in logistics and shipping.

Dr. Melanie Rolli, she is in biomedical research.

Randall Funke is a not just programming but putting in entire ecosystems and then we're talking about what might that look like not just for educational institutions but also for students in how to support their learning and their viability.

It's human capital to future employers like John Walker, like Dr. Melanie Rolli, and like the future generations of the businesses that will come because if we don't educate today's students for tomorrow's challenges, they become redundant and that's when you think about it what we just did.

This is very rare in the sense that you have people from such different industries talking with each other because often we go to our separate conferences and we talk to the already converted but we never really hear each other the way that we have heard each other now and so I wanted to say thank you to the WHERS Conference Organizers and to the UniRanks system for sponsoring such important discourse and hopefully, we'll get invited because I think there's another conference at some point of time to deep dive into these issues on a different level than just the panel discussion.

Thank you very much.

Randall Funke
Thank you very much.

John Walker
Thank you.